THE LITERATURE 

OF THE 

SECOND CENTURY. 



./*V N A'. WYNNE, D.D.. J?H. BERNARD, D.D. 
AND S.V HEMPHILL, B.D. 



Jfoftr gork : 
JAMES POTT & CO., 
14 & 16, ASTOR PLACE. 
189 1. 



rot 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE I. 

PAGE 

The Evidence to Christianity supplied by 

the Literature of the Sub-Apostolic Age i 

LECTURE II. 

The Gradual Growth of the New Testament 

Canon 55 

By Rev. Frederick R. Wynne, D.D., Canon 
of Christ Church, and Professor of Pastoral Theology 
in the University of Dublin. 

LECTURE III. 
The Apocryphal Gospels 97 

LECTURE IV. 

The Miraculous in Early Christian Litera- 
ture 137 

By Rev. John Henry Bernard, B.D., 
Fellow of Trinity College, and Archbishop King's Lecturci 
in Divinity in the University of Dublin. 
vii 



Vlll 



CONTENTS. 



LECTURE V. 

PAGE 

The Long-lost Harmony 181 

LECTURE VI. 

Early Vestiges of the Fourfold Gospel . 223 

By Rev. Samuel Hemphill, B.I)., 
Rector of Weslport, Professor of Biblical Greek 
in the University of Dublin. 



LECTURE I. 

THE EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 
SUPPLIED BY THE LITERATURE OF THE 
SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE. 

By Rev. CANON WYNNE, D.D. 



I 



NOTICE TO LECTURES I. AND II. 



The information given in these Lectures as to the dates, 
authorship, and genuineness of the relics of Christian anti- 
quity referred to, has been chiefly gathered from the follow- 
ing authorities : 

Bishop Lightfoot's Apostolic Fathers. 
Bishop Westcott's Canon of the New Testament. 
Sanday's Gospels in the Second Century. 
Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography: Article 
" Apostolic Fathers." 
Salmon's Lntrodtiction to the New Testament. 

The extracts from early writers have been taken partly 
from Bishop Lightfoot's translation, and partly from the 
Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Literature 
(Griffith, Farran & Co.). 



LECTURE I. 



THE EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY 
SUP P TIED BY THE LITERATURE OF THE 
SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE. 

\ I THEN we look into the starry sky 



* at a certain season of the year, we 
see a splendid planet called Jupiter. We 
cannot help being delighted with its glory 
and beauty. If we examine this planet care- 
fully through a telescope, we shall find that 
there revolve around it several other shining 
bodies or moons. They are so small that to 
the naked eye their light is merged in that of 
the great planet. But in reality some light 
is transmitted to us by them which would 
otherwise have been lost, and by their move- 
ments and their relations with one another 
and with the central body important know- 
ledge is conveyed to us. 




4 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



As we look back through the ages of the 
past, we see plainly one splendid moral 
phenomenon. It is the picture of the Lord 
Jesus and the story of the Lord Jesus given 
to us in the gospels. This is the clearest and 
strongest evidence for Christianity. The best 
proof you can have of the planet's shining 
is to look at its light. The most convincing 
proof of the reality of Christ's existence, of 
the divinity of His nature, of the truth of 
His teaching, is to read the story of what 
He did and said. When other evidence has 
failed, many have been persuaded by this 
alone. They have found an irresistible re- 
sponse in their moral nature to the gospel 
ideal of goodness. They have felt that the 
simple and artless story of facts in the 
history of Jesus could not possibly have been 
either purposely fabricated or gradually 
evolved. There is what is called an in- 
stinctive perception of the difference between 
truth and fiction, which is doubtless the 
result of long experience gained almost 
unconsciously amidst the continual judg- 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 5 



ments of daily life ; and this perception has 
made the account of Christ's sublime works 
and noble words bear with it an incontest- 
able witness to its own truth. 

Nevertheless it is very important to be able 
to supplement such instinctive judgment by 
definite knowledge. It is well to have clear 
information which makes us sure that the 
accounts we have of our Saviour's life are 
the genuine products of the age in which He 
lived, that the story we feel to be so beautiful 
is really the story told by His own com- 
panions, and that the words that thrill in our 
consciences to-day and the exhibitions of 
Divine Power before which our spirits bow 
in reverence have come to us directly from 
eye-witnesses to His majesty. 

In this we are helped by the documents 
which I have now to describe. They are, 
like the satellites of the planet, almost 
lost in its glory. They are, in comparison 
to the apostolic writings, poor and insignifi- 
cant ; yet they give us information which 
enables us to appreciate more exactly the 



6 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



value of those writings. Their little glimmer 
helps us to weigh and measure the orb in 
whose light they are effaced. I wish to bring 
before you in this paper the testimony to the 
truth of Christianity which is borne by the 
literature of the sub-apostolic age. The "apo- 
stolic age" is the time during which apostles 
of the Lord Jesus lived ; the " sub-apostolic " 
is the time immediately succeeding, during 
which men lived who were born before all the 
apostles had died. The period is not defined 
by any precise limits ; but supposing some of 
the apostles to have been a few years younger 
than our Lord, they may be supposed to have 
lived to A.D. 80 or 90. There is a very 
ancient tradition that St. John died at a very 
advanced age, about A.D. 100. The genera- 
tion after the apostles could hardly have been 
extinct till the middle of the second century. 
In this paper, however, I use the term sub- 
apostolic as embracing the close of the first 
century and the earlier part of the second, or, 
approximately speaking, from A.D. 80 to 120. 
Three writers of these years are called 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 7 



" apostolic Fathers" because there is reason to 
believe that in their youth they came under 
the direct personal influence of some of the 
apostles. Their names are Clement, Ignatius, 
and Polycarp. The other writings that come 
down to us from that period are few in 
number, and all are very poor in comparison 
to the grand literature that emanates from 
the apostolic age. While the men lived who 
had been companions and pupils of the Lord 
Jesus, and who had been commissioned by 
Him to teach in His name, while the remem- 
brance of His glorious presence was fresh, 
and the echoes of His own words ringing 
clearly in their hearts, a great number of 
beautiful writings were sent out into the 
world, either composed by themselves, or 
containing the substance of their well-known 
instructions. After the apostles died, although 
the Church spread with marvellous rapidity, 
yet the number of those who taught it by 
writing does not seem to have kept pace 
with its increase. The minds of Christians 
still looked back to the apostles ; and their 



8 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



"memoirs" (as Justin Martyr calls them), 
their " traditions," the truths they had handed 
down from their Master, were the staple food 
of the Church's life. And means of spreading 
literature in those days, we must remember, 
were tedious and insecure. There were no 
printers, no publishers, no reviewers. Slowly 
and with difficulty from one city to another, 
carried by stray travellers in unwieldy 
parchment rolls, the written thoughts had to 
make their way. Those that have survived 
in the hard struggle for existence are pro- 
bably few in comparison to those that have 
perished. Particularly hard the struggle 
must have been in the early Christian Church, 
whose members had to hold their faith in 
spite of popular prejudice and religious 
jealousies, ready to break out at any moment 
into fierce persecution. Thus the sub-apo- 
stolic writings which we read to-day are like 
the fossils found in much disturbed strata, 
a few scattered remnants of a fauna and 
flora most of which has perished; specimens 
which are precious as showing, not the 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 9 



quantity, but the kind of organisms that 
characterized the period to which they 
belonged. 

The principal writings which have come 
down to us from the close of the first and 
the beginning of the second century are the 
following : 

1. A letter called The Epistle of Clement 
to the Corinthians. 

2. A letter or address called The Epistle 
of Barnabas. 

3. Seven letters by Ignatius, Bishop of 
Antioch. 

4. A letter by Polycarp, Bishop of 
Smyrna. 

5. A curious and somewhat visionary book 
called The Shepherd of Hernias. 

There is also an interesting document, 
lately discovered, called The Teaching of the 
Twelve Apostles, which is generally ranked 
as belonging to the sub-apostolic age. The 
treatise, after careful analysis, has been 
shown to consist of two elements — one 
Jewish, which is probably older than the 



io LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Christian era ; the other added by perhaps 
more than one Christian hand during the 
period we are considering. As, however, 
there are many literary difficulties in fixing 
the date of its issue in its present form, and 
as I wish to direct your attention only to 
evidence as to which we can be quite sure, 
I shall not include the Didache in this 
study. I purpose to give you some brief 
information about the other documents I 
have named, to quote some characteristic 
extracts from each of them, and then to show 
you the nature of the testimony they bear to 
the truth of Christianity. 

But before doing this, I must ask your 
attention to two other well-known docu- 
ments which belong to the same age. They 
are written, not by believers in Christianity, 
but by heathens, (i) The historian Tacitus 
has a brief allusion to the Christian religion 
in his Annals. Tacitus was "praetor" of 
Rome under the emperor Domitian, A.D. 88, 
and consul under Nerva, A.D. 97. He wrote 
his Annals in the beginning of the second 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY, n 



century. After describing the terrible fire 
which took place in Rome, in the tenth year 
of Nero's reign, A.D. 64, which Nero himself 
was suspected of having caused, Tacitus 
goes on to say : 

" To suppress therefore this common 
rumour, Nero procured others to be accused, 
and inflicted exquisite punishment upon 
those people, who were in abhorrence for 
their crimes, and were commonly known by 
the name of Christians. 

" They had their denomination from 
Christus, who in the reign of Tiberius was 
put to death as a criminal by the procurator 
Pontius Pilate. This pernicious superstition, 
though checked for a while, broke out again, 
and spread, not only over Judea, the source 
of this evil, but reached the city also ; 
whither flow from all quarters all things vile 
and shameful, and where they find shelter 
and encouragement. 

" At first they only were apprehended who 
confessed themselves of that sect ; afterwards 
a vast multitude, discovered by them : all 



12 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



which were condemned, not so much for the 
crime of burning the city, as for their 
enmity to mankind. Their executions were 
so contrived as to expose them to derision 
and contempt Some were covered over 
with the skins of wild beasts, and torn to 
pieces by dogs ; some were crucified ; others, 
having been daubed over with combustible 
materials, were set up as lights in the night 
time, and thus burned to death. 

" Nero made use of his own gardens as 
a theatre upon this occasion, and also ex- 
hibited the diversions of the circus, some- 
times standing in the crowds as a spectator, 
in the habit of a charioteer, at other times 
driving a chariot himself; till at length these 
men, though really criminal and deserving 
exemplary punishment, began to be commi- 
serated, as people who were destroyed, not 
out of regard to the public welfare, but only 
to gratify the cruelty of one man." 

The second document is the letter of the 
younger Pliny to the emperor Trajan, written 
about A.D. 112. Trajan died in A.D. 117. 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 13 

The genuineness of this letter, as well as 
of the passage in the Annals of Tacitus, has 
passed through the crucible of the most 
searching modern criticism. The letter runs 
as follows : 

" It is my constant custom, sir, to refer 
myself to you in all matters concerning 
which I have any doubt. For who can 
better direct me where I hesitate, or instruct 
me where I am ignorant? I have never 
been present at any trials of Christians ; so 
that I know not well what is the subject- 
matter of punishment, or of inquiry, or what 
strictness ought to be used in either. Nor 
have I been a little perplexed to determine 
whether any difference ought to be made 
upon account of age, or whether the young 
and tender, and the full-grown and robust, 
ought to be treated all alike ; whether repen- 
tance should entitle to pardon, or whether 
all who have once been Christians ought to 
be punished, though they are now no longer 
so ; whether the name itself, although no 
crimes be detected, or crimes only belonging 



14 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



to the name ought to be punished. Concern- 
ing all these things I am in doubt. In the 
meantime I have taken this course with 
all who have been brought before me and 
have been accused as Christians. 

" I have put the question to them whether 
they were Christians. Upon their confessing 
to me that they were, I repeated the question 
a second and a third time, threatening also 
to punish them with death. Such as still 
persisted, I ordered away to be punished ; 
for it was no doubt with me, whatever might 
be the nature of their opinion, that con- 
tumacy and inflexible obstinacy ought to be 
punished. There were others of the same 
infatuation, whom, because they are Roman 
citizens, I have noted down to be sent to the 
city. 

" In a short time the crime spreading itself, 
even whilst under persecution, as is usual in 
such cases, divers sorts of people came in my 
way. An information was presented to me 
without mentioning the author, containing 
the names of many persons, who upon exa- 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 15 



initiation denied that they were Christians, 
or had ever been so ; who repeated after me 
an invocation of the gods, and with wine 
and frankincense made supplication to your 
image, which for that purpose I have caused 
to be brought and set before them, together 
with the statues of the deities. Moreover, 
they reviled the name of Christ. None of 
which things, as is said, they who are really 
Christians can by any means be compelled 
to do. These, therefore, I thought proper to 
discharge. 

" Others were named by an informer, who 
at first confessed themselves Christians, and 
afterwards denied it. The rest said they 
had been Christians, but had left them ; 
some three years ago, some longer, and one, 
or more, above twenty years. 

" They all worshipped your image, and 
the statues of the gods ; these also reviled 
Christ. They affirmed that the whole of 
their fault or error lay in this, that they were 
wont to meet together on a stated day be- 
fore it was light, and sing among themselves 



1 6 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



alternately a hymn to Christ, as a god, and 
bind themselves by an oath, not to the com- 
mission of any wickedness, but not to be 
guilty of theft, or robbery, or adultery, never 
to falsify their word, nor to deny a pledge 
committed to them, when called upon to 
return it. When these things were per- 
formed, it was their custom to separate, and 
then to come together again to a meal which 
they ate in common, without any disorder ; 
but this they had foreborne since the pub- 
lication of my edict, by which, according to 
your commands, I prohibited assemblies. 

" After receiving this account, I judged it 
the more necessary to examine, and that by 
torture, two maid-servants, which were called 
ministers. But I have discovered nothing 
beside a bad and excessive superstition. 
Suspending therefore all judicial proceedings, 
I have recourse to you for advice ; for it has 
appeared unto me a matter highly deserving 
consideration, especially upon account of the 
great number of persons who are in danger 
of suffering. For many of all ages, and 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 17 



every rank, of both sexes likewise, are ac- 
cused, and will be accused. Nor has the 
contagion of this superstition seized cities 
only, but the lesser towns also, and the open 
country. Nevertheless, it seems to me that 
it may be restrained and corrected. It is 
certain that the temples, which were almost 
forsaken, begin to be more frequented. And 
the sacred solemnities, after a long inter- 
mission, are revived. Victims likewise are 
everywhere bought up, whereas for some 
time there were few purchasers. Whence it 
is easy to imagine what numbers of men 
might be reclaimed, if pardon were granted 
to those who shall repent." 

These two documents are of intense inter- 
est. They give us a view from outside of what 
we are accustomed to see from inside. They 
make us sure of the following facts : that 
not many years had passed after the death 
of Christ under Pontius Pilate before a great 
multitude of people in various parts of the 
world (from its great centre Rome to distant 
provinces) had become disciples of the Lord 

2 



iS LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Jesus ; that they were greatly scorned and 
hated for doing so ; that though they really 
lived harmless and religious lives, they were 
accused of atheism, misanthropy, and ob- 
stinacy ; that fierce and cruel persecutions 
were inflicted on them to make them re- 
nounce their religion and revile the person 
they called Christ ; but that vast numbers of 
them suffered torture and death rather than 
fail in their loyalty to this Christ. 

Apparently by chance these two docu- 
ments from that remote antiquity are pre- 
served among the remnants of classic litera- 
ture. Not until comparatively recent years 
was any notice taken of them. And now 
by their unconscious witness they bring us 
to a standpoint close to the period during 
which the apostles laboured, and let us see, 
even through the eyes of her enemies, the 
Church of Christ carrying on in that early 
age her brave battle against heathenism. It 
is as if out of a pile of old newspapers from 
a distant land we had found two which con- 
tained as matter of every-day gossip the 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 19 



adventures of some dear friend of whose 
history we were longing to know the details. 

Turning now from this outside view of 
the Christian Church, in which it appears as 
an unpopular, despised, persecuted, and yet 
very steadfastly determined body of people, 
pressing on its own way of life in spite of 
every opposition, let us look for a while at 
the view from within, and study the picture 
of the Church's life drawn for us by the 
writings of her own members. I think I 
ought to mention first a brief writing, net on 
parchment but on stone, which in harmony 
yet in strange contrast with the heathen 
notices of the persecuted religion, comes to 
us as a testimony from a silent city of the 
dead. Among the inscriptions in the long 
buried Roman catacombs is found the fol- 
lowing from the reign of Hadrian, who suc- 
ceeded Trajan, A.D. 117 : 

" In Christ. In the time of the emperor 
Adrian, Marius, a young military officer, who 
had lived long enough when with his blood 
he gave up his life for Christ. At length he 



20 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



rested in peace. The well-deserving set up 
this with tears and in fear on the 6th Ides 
of December" (Maitland's Church in the 
Catacombs) . 

The writing for which I next ask your 
attention is the latest in date of the series 
which we have to consider in this lecture. 
The Shepherd of Hennas is mentioned and 
quoted several times by writers in the latter 
part of the second century. Great reverence 
was paid to it on the supposition that the 
author was an " apostolic " Father. He was 
supposed to be the same as the Hermas 
mentioned by St. Paul in his letter to the 
Romans. The researches of modern criticism 
have shown this identity to be mistaken ; yet 
from internal as well as external evidence 
w T e may conclude that he wrote very early 
in the second century, during the lifetime of 
the Clement whose letter we shall consider 
just now, and that he belonged to the sub- 
apostolic generation. His book is simple 
in style, very visionary and fanciful, but 
written with deep, earnest, and practical 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 21 



piety. He shows a firm belief in the great 
facts on which our faith rests. He speaks 
of the Lord Jesus always as the Son of God, 
implying continually His Incarnation and 
the forgiveness of sins through His redemp- 
tion. He is very familiar with persecution, 
and feels deeply the danger of denying the 
Lord Jesus, and the honour and blessedness 
of being steadfast for Him. Many passages 
of his book are reflections of the New Testa- 
ment teaching, if not actual quotations from 
its writings. The Shepherd of Hennas is 
often called the Pilgrim's Progress of the 
early Church. 

The following extracts will enable you to 
judge of its spirit : 

" ' Why,' said I, ' is the Son of God, in this 
parable, put in the place of a servant ? ' 
' Hearken,' said he. ' The Son of God is 
not put in the condition of a servant, but in 
great power and authority.' I said unto 
him, 1 How, sir ? I understand it not.' ' Be- 
cause,' said he, ' the Son set His messengers 
over those whom the Father delivered unto 



22 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Him, to keep every one of them ; but He 
Himself laboured very much, and suffered 
much, that He might blot out their offences. 
For no vineyard can be digged without much 
labour and pains. Wherefore, having blotted 
out the sins of His people, He showed to 
them the paths of life, giving them the law 
which he had received of the Father.' . . . 

" ' First of all, sir,' said I, 'tell me what this 
rock and this gate denote.' 'Hearken,' said 
he. ' This rock and this gate are the Son 
of God.' I replied, ' Sir, how can that be, 
seeing the rock is old, but the gate new?' 
' Hear,' said he, ' O foolish man, and under- 
stand. The Son of God is, indeed, more 
ancient than any creature, insomuch that He 
was in counsel with His Father at the crea- 
tion of all things. But the gate is therefore 
new, because He appeared in the last days 
at the fulness of time; that they who shall 
attain unto salvation may by it enter into the 
kingdom of God.' . . , 'No man shall 
enter into the kingdom of God, but he who 
shall take upon him the name of the Son of 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 23 

God. For if you would enter into any city, 
and that city should be encompassed with a 
wall, and had only one gate, could you enter 
into that city except by that gate ? ' I 
answered, £ Sir, how could I do otherwise ? ' 
'As therefore, 5 said he, 'there would be no 
other way of entering into that city but by 
its gate, so neither can any one enter into the 
kingdom of God, but only by the name of 
His Son, who is most dear unto Him.' He 
added, ' Whosoever therefore shall nt>t take 
upon him His name, he shall not enter into 
the kingdom of God.' . . . ' Why then, 
sir, have all these fruit, indeed, but yet some 
fairer than others ? ' ' Hearken,' said he. 
'Whosoever have suffered for the name of the 
Lord are esteemed honourable by the Lord ; 
and all their offences are blotted out, because 
they have suffered death for the name of the 
Son of God. Hear now why their fruits are 
different, and some of them excel others. 
They who, being brought before magistrates, 
and being asked, denied not the Lord, but 
suffered with a ready mind, these are more 



24 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY 

honourable with the Lord. The fruits, there- 
fore, that are the most fair, are these. But 
they who were fearful and doubtful, and have 
deliberated with themselves whether they 
should confess or deny Christ, and yet have 
suffered, their fruits are smaller, because that 
this thought came into their hearts. For it 
is a wicked and evil thought for a servant 
to deliberate whether he should deny his 
master. . . . But ye who suffer death for 
His nalne's sake ought to honour the Lord, 
that He has esteemed you worthy to bear 
His name, and that you should be delivered 
from all your sins. And why, therefore, do 
you not rather esteem yourselves happy ? ' 

I said unto her, ' Lady, I would 
know what it is that they have suffered ? ' 
' Hear then,' said she : ' wild beasts, scourg- 
ings, imprisonments, and crosses, for His 
name's sake. For this cause, the right hand 
of holiness belongs to them, and to all others, 
as many as shall suffer for the name of 
God.' . . . 

''Abstain not from any good works, but do 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 25 

them. ' Hear/ said he, ' what the interior 
of those good works is which thou must do, 
that thou mayest be saved. The first of all 
is faith, the fear of the Lord, charity, concord, 
equity, truth, patience, chastity. There is 
nothing better than these things in the life of 
man, who shall keep and do things in their 
life. Hear next what follow these. To 
minister to the widows, not to despise the 
fatherless and poor ; to redeem the servants 
of God from necessity ; to be hospitable (for 
in hospitality there is sometimes great fruit) ; 
not to be contentious, but be quiet ; to be 
humble above all men ; to reverence the 
aged ; to labour to be righteous ; to respect 
the brotherhood ; to bear affront, to be long- 
suffering ; not to cast away those that have 
fallen from the faith, but to convert them, 
and make them be of good cheer ; to 
admonish sinners ; not to oppress those that 
are our debtors ; and all other things of a 
like kind.' " 

I call your attention next to the epistle of 
Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, addressed to the 



26 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Philippians. The most searching criticism 
has made us sure of the genuineness of this 
precious old letter. It was written shortly 
after the martyrdom of Ignatius, Bishop of 
Antioch, the date of which is fixed by Bishop 
Lightfoot, on the most carefully stated 
ground, at about A.D. no. Polycarp was 
born about A.D. 70, and was himself martyred 
by fire in extreme old age, c. A.D. 155. The 
great writer, Irenaeus, about A.D. 180, speaks 
of him thus : "I can tell the very place where 
the blessed Polycarp used to sit when he dis- 
coursed ; . . . and the discourses which 
he held before the people, and how he would 
describe his intercourse with John and with 
the rest of those who had seen the Lord, and 
how he would relate their words. And 
whatsoever things he had heard from them 
about the Lord, and about His miracles, and 
about His teaching, Polycarp, as having 
received them from eye-witnesses of the 
life of the Word, would relate altogether in 
accordance with the Scriptures." 

Let me read you two or three sentences 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 27 

written by this venerable man, who in his 
youth listened to St. John and other com- 
panions of our Lord. 

"Polycarp and the presbyters that are with 
him unto the Church of God which sojour- 
neth at Philippi ; Mercy unto you and peace 
from God Almighty and Jesus Christ our 
Saviour be multiplied. 

I. "I rejoiced with you greatly in our Lord 
Jesus Christ, for that ye received the fol- 
lowers of the true Love and escorted them 
on their way, as befitted you — those men 
encircled in saintly bonds which are the 
diadems of them that be truly chosen of 
God and our Lord ; and that the steadfast 
root of your faith which was famed from 
primitive times abideth until now and 
beareth fruit unto our Lord Jesus Christ, 
who endured to face even death for our sins, 
whom God raised, having loosed the pangs 
of Hades ; on whom, though ye saw Him not, 
ye believe with joy unutterable and full of 
glory; unto which joy many desire to enter 
in ; forasmuch as ye know that it is by grace 



2'g LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



ye are saved, not of works, but by the will of 
God through Jesus Christ. 

2. "Wherefore gird up your loins and serve 
God in fear and truth, forsaking the vain and 
empty talking and the error of the many, 
for that ye have believed on Him that raised 
our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, and 
gave unto Him glory and a throne on His 
right hand ; unto whom all things were made 
subject that are in heaven and that are on 
the earth ; to whom every creature that hath 
breath doeth service, who cometh as judge 
of quick and dead ; whose blood God will 
require of them that are disobedient unto 
Him. Now He that raised Him from the 
dead will raise us also ; if we do His will 
and walk in His commandments and love 
the things which He loved, abstaining from 
all unrighteousness, covetousness, love of 
money, evil speaking, false witness ; not ren- 
dering evil for evil or railing for railing. 

8. "Let him therefore without ceasing hold 
fast by our hope, and by the earnest of our 
righteousness, which is Jesus Christ, who took 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 29 

up our sins in His own body upon the tree, 
who did no sin, neither was guile found in 
His mouth, but for our sakes He endured 
all things, that we might live in Him. Let 
us therefore become imitators of His endur- 
ance ; and if we should suffer for His name's 
sake, let us glorify Him. For He gave this 
example to us in His own person, and we 
believed this. 

9. " I exhort you all therefore to be obe- 
dient unto the word of righteousness, and to 
practise all endurance, which also ye saw 
with your own eyes in the blessed Ignatius 
and Zosimus and Rufus, yea, and in others 
also who came from among yourselves, as 
well as in Paul himself and the rest of the 
apostles ; being persuaded that all these 
ran not in vain, but in faith and righteous- 
ness, and that they are in their due place 
in the presence of the Lord, with whom 
also they suffered. For they loved not the 
present world, but Him that died for our 
sakes and was raised by God for us. 

12. "For I am persuaded that ye are well 



3o LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

trained in the sacred writings, and nothing 
is hidden from you. But to myself this is 
not granted. Only, as it is said in these 
Scriptures, Be ye angry and sin not, and let 
not the sun set on your wrath. Blessed is he 
that remembereth this ; and I trust that this 
is in you. Now may the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, and the eternal High 
Priest Himself, the God Jesus Christ, build 
you up in faith and truth, and in all gentle- 
ness, and in all avoidance of wrath, and 
in forbearance and long suffering, and in 
patient endurance and in purity; and may 
He grant unto you a lot and portion among 
His saints, and to us with you, and to all 
that are under heaven, who shall believe 
on our Lord and God Jesus Christ and 
on His Father, that raised Him from the 
dead. Pray for all the saints. Pray also 
for kings and powers and princes, and for 
them that persecute and hate you, and for 
the enemies of the Cross, that your fruit may 
be manifest among all men, that ye may be 
perfect in Him." 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 31 

From the letter of Polycarp to the epistles 
of Ignatius we have only to go back a very 
short time. Ignatius wrote during the stages 
of his journey to martyrdom ; Polycarp 
almost immediately after that solemn event. 
But the testimony of Ignatius brings us 
thirty years nearer to the life of Christ. We 
have seven deeply interesting letters written 
by him. Bishop Lightfoot spent years of 
patient study in mastering all the evidence 
bearing on these precious relics of antiquity. 
He learned two difficult languages, Armenian 
and Coptic, so as to be able to read and 
weigh all the documents connected with the 
subject. I need not occupy your time by 
details as to the various forms under which 
the epistles have been preserved through the 
long centuries. It is sufficient to say that 
the seven letters gathered together in the 
shorter collection called the " Vossian " are 
genuine letters by Ignatius. 

Archdeacon Farrar, in his recent work, 
Lives of the Fathers, gives an interesting note 
as to the manner in which the Syriac MSS. 



32 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

of the letters of Ignatius were procured. 
" Archbishop Ussher, in his anxiety to throw 
light on the Ignatian controversy, had in- 
voked the assistance of the Government ; 
and the captains of vessels who traded in the 
Levant were ordered to bring home what 
MSS. they could. Then Mr. Huntington, a 
chaplain at Aleppo, tried to interest the 
Greek ecclesiastics in the matter, and in 1679 
braved all difficulties and visited the Nitrian 
monasteries. He obtained some MSS., which 
he placed in the Bodleian. Assemani, going 
with a commission from Pope Clement XL, 
brought home from Nitria some four MSS., 
which are now in the Vatican. Lastly, in 
1830, Archdeacon Tattan brought home forty 
more MSS., which are now in the British 
Museum." 

Ignatius was born c. 40. Martyred c. 110. 
Very early tradition speaks of him as an 
apostolic man, one who had intercourse with 
St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. We can 
be sure, from the date of his birth, that he 
must have been a middle-aged man before 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 33 



St. John died. A few extracts will show the 
harmony of his teaching with that of the 
apostles, 

1. "I know both who I am, and to whom 
I write : I, a person condemned ; ye, such as 
have obtained mercy. I, exposed to danger ; 
ye, confirmed against danger. Ye are the 
passage of those that are killed for God, the 
companions of Paul in the mysteries of the 
gospel— the holy, the martyr, the deservedly 
most happy Paul ; at whose feet may I be 
found, when I shall have attained unto God ; 
who throughout all his epistles makes men- 
tion of you in Christ Jesus : . . . of all 
which nothing is hid from you, if ye have 
perfect faith and charity in Christ Jesus, 
which are the beginning and end of life ; for 
the beginning is faith, the end charity. . . . 

2. " For this cause did the Lord suffer the 
ointment to be poured on His head, that 
He might breathe the breath of immortality 
into His Church. Be not ye therefore 
anointed with the evil savour of the doc- 
trine of the prince of this world ; let him not 

3 



34 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



take you captive from the life that is set 
before you. And why are not we all wise, 
seeing we have received the knowledge of 
God, which is Jesus Christ ? Why do we 
suffer ourselves foolishly to perish, not con- 
sidering the gift which the Lord has truly 
sent to us ? Let my life be sacrificed for the 
doctrine of the Cross, which is indeed a 
scandal to the unbelievers, but to us is sal- 
vation and life eternal ' Where is the wise 
man ? Where is the disputer ? ' Where is 
the boasting of them that are called wise ? 
For our Lord Jesus Christ was, according 
to the dispensation of God, conceived in the 
womb of Mary, of the seed of David, by the 
Holy Ghost. He was born and baptized, 
that through His passion He might purify 
water ' to the washing away of sin.' . . . 

3. " But if Jesus Christ shall give me grace 
through your prayers, and if it be His will, 
I purpose, in a second epistle, which I will 
suddenly write unto you, to manifest to you 
more fully the dispensation of which I have 
now begun to speak, unto the new Man, 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 35 

which is Jesus Christ ; both in His faith and 
charity, in His suffering and in His resur- 
rection ; especially if the Lord shall make 
known unto me, that ye all by name come 
together in common in one faith, and in one 
Jesus Christ (who was of the race of David 
according to the flesh) the Son of man, and 
Son of God ; obeying your bishop and pres- 
bytery with an entire affection ; breaking 
one and the same bread, which is the 
medicine of immortality, our antidote that we 
should not die, but live for ever in Christ 
Jesus. . . 

4. "All the ends of the world, and the 
kingdoms of it, will profit me nothing. I 
would rather die for Jesus Christ, than ride 
to the utmost ends of the earth. Him I 
seek who died for us ; Him I desire who rose 
again for us. This is the gain that is laid up 
for me." 

The epistle called the Epistle of Clement 
had a great name and fame in the early 
Church. It seems to have been in many 
places read aloud in the Christian assemblies. 



36 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



It is translated in the oldest version of the 
New Testament, the Syriac " Peshito 3 " and 
comes after the canonical books in the Alex- 
andrian MS. It is quoted by several suc- 
ceeding writers in the second century. The 
epistle does not bear the name of Clement, 
but is sent in the name of the Church at 
Rome to the Church at Corinth. The latest 
date that can be assigned to it is A.D. 95 or 
96, during the trying times of the reign of 
Domitian. 

1. " Through zeal and envy, the most faith- 
ful and righteous pillars of the Church 
have been persecuted, even to the most 
grievous deaths. Let us therefore set 
before our eyes the holy apostles ; Peter, by 
unjust envy, underwent, not one or two, but 
many sufferings, till at last, being martyred, 
he went to the place of glory that was due 
unto him. For the same cause did Paul in 
like manner receive the reward of his 
patience. Seven times he was in bonds ; he 
was whipped, was stoned ; he preached both 
in the East and in the West, leaving behind 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 37 



him the glorious report of his faith ; and so 
having taught the whole world of righteous- 
ness, and for that end travelled even to the 
utmost bounds of the West, he at last suf- 
fered martyrdom, by the command of the 
governors, and departed out of the world, 
and went unto his holy place, being become 
a most eminent pattern of patience unto all 
ages. . . . 

2. " Let us consider what is good, and 
acceptable, and well pleasing in the sight 
of Him that made us. Let us look stead- 
fastly to the blood of Christ, and see how 
precious His blood is in the sight of God : 
which, being shed for our salvation, has 
obtained the grace of repentance for all 
the world. . . . 

3. " Let us consider, beloved, how the 
Lord does continually show us, that there 
shall be a future resurrection, of which He 
has made our Lord Jesus Christ the first- 
fruits, raising Him from the dead. Let us 
contemplate, beloved, the resurrection, that 
is continually made before our eyes. . . . 



38 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

4. " This is the way, beloved, in which we 
may find our Saviour, even Jesus Christ, 
the High Priest of all our offerings, the 
Defender and Helper of our weakness. By 
Him we look up to the highest heavens, and 
behold as in a glass His spotless and most 
excellent visage. By Him are the eyes of 
our hearts opened ; by Him our foolish and 
darkened understanding rejoiceth to behold 
His wonderful light. By Him would God 
have us to taste the knowledge of immor- 
tality, i who, being the brightness of His 
glory, is by so much greater than the angels 
as He has by inheritance obtained a more 
excellent name than they.' For so it is 
written, 'Who maketh His angels spirits, 
and His ministers a flame of fire.' But to 
His Son thus saith the Lord, ' Thou art My 
Son ; to-day have I begotten Thee.' ' Ask 
of Me, and I will give Thee the heathen for 
Thine inheritance, and the utmost parts of 
the earth for Thy possession.' And again 
He saith unto Him, 1 Sit Thou on My right 
hand, until I make Thine enemies Thy foot- 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 39 



stool.' But who are His enemies ? Even 
the wicked, and such as oppose their own 
wills to the will of God. Let us therefore 
march on, men and brethren, with all earnest- 
ness in His holy laws. . . . 

5. " For as God liveth, and the Lord Jesus 
Christ liveth, and the Holy Spirit, the Faith, 
and the Hope of the elect, so shall he who, 
in lowliness of mind with steadfast meekness, 
hath wrought without sorrow the judgments 
and statutes which are given by God, even 
he shall be enrolled and had in honour, 
among the number of those who are saved 
through Jesus Christ, by whom is glory to 
Him for ever and ever. Amen." 

One more sub-apostolic writing we have 
to consider. It is called the Epistle of 
Barnabas. It was received in parts of the 
ancient Church with great reverence, was by 
many looked upon as Scripture, under the 
idea that it was written by Barnabas, the 
companion of St. Paul. This idea, however, 
does not seem to be well founded. Dr. 
Salmon, after a careful review of all the 



40 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



evidence, concludes that though there is un- 
certainty as to the authorship of the book, 
it was certainly written during the reign of 
Vespasian, shortly after the destruction 
of Jerusalem, A.D. 70-79. The antiquity of 
the document gives it a very deep interest. 
We find in it, as to reasoning and breadth 
of view, a sad decline from the apostolic 
tone. But a few extracts will show the firm 
grasp of our Christian creed held by this 
old writer, who hovered on the border be- 
tween the apostolic and sub-apostolic age. 

1. " For this cause did our Lord vouchsafe 
to give up His body to destruction, that 
through the forgiveness of our sins we might 
be sanctified ; that is, by the sprinkling of 
His blood. Now, for what concerns the 
things that are written about Him — some 
belong to the people of the Jews, and some 
to us. For thus saith the Scripture, * He 
was wounded for our transgressions, He was 
bruised for our iniquities, and by His blood 
we are healed. He was led as a lamb to the 
slaughter ; and as a sheep before his shearers 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 41 



is dumb, so He opened not His mouth.' 
Wherefore we ought the more to give thanks 
unto God, for that He hath both declared 
unto us what is past, and not suffered us 
to be without understanding of those things 
that are to come. . . . 

2. " Now, how He suffered for us, seeing 
that it was by men that He underwent it, 
I will show you. The prophets, having 
received from Him the gift of prophecy, 
spake before concerning Him ; but He, that 
He might abolish death, and make known 
the resurrection from the dead, was content, 
as it was necessary to appear in the flesh, 
that He might make good the promise 
before given to our fathers ; and preparing 
Himself a new people might demonstrate to 
them, whilst He was upon earth, that after 
the resurrection He would judge the world. 
And finally, teaching the people of Israel, 
and doing many wonders and signs among 
them, He preached to them and showed 
the exceeding great love which He bare 
towards them. And when He chose His 



42 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



apostles, which were afterwards to publish 
His gospel, He took men who had been 
very great sinners, that thereby He might 
plainly show, ( That He came not to call the 
righteous, but sinners to repentance.' That 
He clearly manifested Himself to be the 
Son of God. For had He not come in the 
flesh, how could men have been able to 
look upon Him that they might be saved ? 

3. " Moses then himself, who had com- 
manded them, saying, ' Ye shall not make 
i:o yourselves any graven or molten image 
to be your God/ yet now did so himself, 
that he might represent to them the figure 
of the Lord Jesus. For he made a brazen 
serpent, and set it up on high, and called the 
people together by a proclamation ; where, 
being come, they entreated Moses that he 
would make an atonement for them, and 
pray that they might be healed. Then 
Moses spake unto them saying, ' When any 
one among you shall be bitten, let him come 
unto the serpent that is set upon the pole ; 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 43 



and let him assuredly trust in him that, 
though he be dead, yet he is able to give 
life, and presently he shall be saved ' ; and 
so they did. See therefore how here also 
you have in this the glory of Jesus ; ' and 
that in Him and to Him are all things,' " 

There are some other curious relics of sub- 
apostolic literature, which, although our time 
would not allow us to consider closely, it 
is well we should be aware of. They are 
writings of "heretics,' 5 men who acknow- 
ledged Christ, but held views different from 
those of the main body of the Christian 
Church. Three of these wrote in the begin- 
ning of the second century — Basilides, Valen- 
tinus, and Marcion. In various ways a good 
deal of their writings has been preserved. 
Their views were visionary and extravagant. 
They speculated wildly about the origin of 
good and evil. But though they wove the 
gospel history into fantastic combination 
with their peculiar speculations, yet even 
amidst these curious minglings of fact- and 
imagination, we see the same majestic figure 



44 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



of Jesus standing prominent, and the same 
general outline of His earthly history that 
we see in the writings of the orthodox. 

Now let us try to put together in our 
minds the results that we gather from the 
writings we have been considering. They 
were all, both the heathen and the Christian 
documents, certainly written by men who 
were born before Christ's contemporaries had 
died. Some were written by men who had 
had in their early days personal intercourse 
with apostles of Christ. They give us a 
photograph of the society called the Christian 
Church at that early period. What do we 
see in the photograph ? We see in the 
generation immediately succeeding that of 
Jesus of Nazareth a wide-spread society, 
bound together by a belief in certain definite 
facts about Him, animated by a deep devo- 
tion and reverence to Him, and striving to 
practise a very lofty morality for His sake. 

We see among the scattered communities 
a close mutual connexion and a certain 
simple but effective organization. We see 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 45 

an initiatory rite of baptism, a rite of break- 
ing bread together in remembrance of their 
Founder's death, and a regular government 
by appointed teachers. We see that the 
members looked back continually, for their 
guidance in opinion and their inspiration in 
life, to the teaching of the men who had been 
companions of Jesus. They spoke of some 
of them by name, and echoed in their exhor- 
tations to each other the sentiments which 
we find in the writings of these earlier 
teachers. Their faith made them fearless 
in facing persecution, and produced among 
them an ideal of what human life ought to 
be, beautiful and holy beyond all that had 
been dreamed of by poet or philosopher be- 
fore the coming of Christ. But the most 
important thing we see in these writings is, 
that the faith held by the sub-apostolic 
Church and the morality taught by her are 
exactly the same as what was taught after- 
wards by an ever-widening series of well- 
known writers through the second century, 
and exactly the same as what is taught in the 



46 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



documents which we believe have come to us 
from the apostles of Christ. Are our gospels 
reliable records of what the apostles wit- 
nessed ? When they tell us of Christ's Life, 
teaching, miracles, Death, Resurrection, and 
Ascension, do they tell us what St. Peter, St. 
James, and St. John saw and declared ? or do 
they tell us something that was afterwards 
made out ? Certainly those Christians who 
were born before the apostles died believed 
that they had taught just as we believe now. 
All the statements, beliefs, and hopes of our 
gospels are re-echoed by these old Fathers. 
If our gospels were not current among them, 
as we have the strongest reason to believe 
they were, yet certainly what they believed 
about Jesus was just the same as our gospels 
declare. 

Thus the sub-apostolic writers form a strong 
link, binding the Church as we know her dis- 
tinctly through the voluminous, well-preserved 
writings we have in the latter half of the se- 
cond century, with the Church of the apostles' 
times. As the years passed, and her branches 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 47 



spread farther and farther, her doctrines took 
a more carefully expressed dogmatic form, 
her organization settled into more rigid lines; 
but the picture of her Founder's character, 
the gospel teaching to men's hearts and con- 
sciences, the belief in the facts of Christ's 
history — all this as told by Irenaeus in 180, 
by Tatian in 160, by Justin Martyr in 140, 
by Hermas in 120, by Polycarp in 112, by 
Ignatius in no, by Clement in 95. by Bar- 
nabas in 80 — all this, I say, was exactly the 
same as what was told by St. Paul, St. Peter, 
St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. 
John, who took their teaching from the lips 
of Jesus Himself, and from the lips of His 
immediate companions. Whether the facts 
happened or not, the belief that they had 
happened, and the holy motives and happy 
hopes that sprang from that belief, most 
certainly continued in the Church without 
variation from a few days after Jesus suffered 
under Pontius Pilate till to-day. The value 
of the sub-apostolic writings is, that they 
supply an important link in the chain of 



48 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



unaltering belief. When did this belief be- 
gin? When did it first appear? Through 
the old literature we hunt up from genera- 
tion to generation, and we ask, Did. it begin 
here ? Did these men invent it ? Did these 
men improve or develop it ? But we have 
to answer as we turn up each old folio, 
Here is the belief, not beginning, not strug- 
gling into existence, but fully formed and 
firmly held, in spite of persecution and ob- 
loquy. Here is the belief in Christ cruci- 
fied and risen ; here is the belief in Christ 
still living as Saviour and King ; here is 
the expectation of Christ to come again in 
judgment. Here is the creed, the same in 
its essence, in every scrap of evidence that 
can be found bearing on the early ages of 
Christianity ; not the slightest indication of 
any other belief among Christians ; not the 
slightest hint by any writer, whether ortho- 
dox or heterodox, through which we can 
trace the beginning of the belief to anything 
else than the actual facts of the story. 

Thus is answered for us our most anxious 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 49 

questioning. Is the religion preached in the 
name of Christ actually true ? It is cer- 
tainly beautiful It is comforting in sorrow, 
strengthening in temptation, elevating in 
daily life : that we feel and know. It has 
certainly been, through the history of the 
world, a blessing and a joy to millions. But 
can we rely upon its statements as authentic 
history? We are satisfied that it was not 
a conscious fabrication. No one now holds 
such an idea. Those who taught such noble 
morality could not possibly have made state- 
ments in order to promulgate it which they 
knew to be false. And we are satisfied that 
the story about Christ dead and risen again 
was not a dreamy imagination. The rough 
touch of persecution would soon waken from 
sentimental reverie. The manifest good 
sense and practical wisdom that breathes 
through the apostolic writings makes it im- 
possible to think that their authors were 
wild enthusiasts, imagining they had seen 
things they never saw, and heard words that 
had never been spoken. 

4 



So LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY, 

But could this gospel story have been a 
gradual growth, by which the aspirations 
and longings of the human heart found for 
themselves a dramatic expression ideally true 
but literally false ? This is the only possible 
solution of the phenomena before us if the 
gospel of Christ is not historically true. It 
is the favourite solution with unbelievers just 
now. But the literature we have been con- 
sidering shows us that this solution is impos- 
sible. It shows, with a proof so clear as to 
be not only probable, but demonstrative, that 
there was no growth ever in the story of 
what Christ was and did. Never was there 
room or opportunity for it. We see from step 
to step, through the long past ages, the Church 
of Christ combined together with a certain 
deep conviction about Jesus of Nazareth as 
the reason for its existence. We walk round 
about her battlements and tell her towers, 
to see if we can find anywhere a place where 
a new story about Christ could have crept 
in. But, like sentinels carefully posted at in- 
tervals within hearing of each other, we find 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 51 

these old Christian authors each testifying-, 
" There could have been no such entry here." 
Irenseus, Justin, Papias, Hermas, Polycarp, 
Ignatius, Barnabas, Clement, St. John, St. 
Paul, they fill up all the time between Christ's 
death and the period when Christianity was as 
well known as it is now. When could the new 
ideas as to the Christian history have begun ? 
When, from a holy and talented martyr, could 
Christ have grown in the Church's mind to 
be the Son of God, dead and risen again ? 
When ? Each of these sentinels stands forth 
and says, " It was not in my time." " We 
received from our teachers the faith that we 
believe to be the faith once for all delivered 
to the saints. We have been commanded that 
if any one brought us any other gospel than 
that which we have received, we are not to 
bid him God-speed." By every one of the 
writers we have been considering Christ is 
looked upon in the same light. Later in the 
Church's development indeed, there were 
fierce disputes as to the nature of Christ, 
and as to the relation of the Divine and 



52 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



human in His Person ; even in the sub- 
apostolic age such questions began to be 
raised, and '" heretics," as we said just now, 
interpreted His history in curious ways. 
They were inclined, not to develop the story, 
but to twist it in fanciful directions. But 
never was there a time during the lives of 
the apostles and those who immediately suc- 
ceeded them when there was any opportunity 
of substituting our supernatural history for 
an originally natural one. Each step that we 
go back shows us the same picture of Jesus 
teaching as never man taught, performing 
works above all human power, crucified, risen 
from the grave, and worshipped by His 
people. 

The only difference is (as we shall have to 
consider in our next lecture), that the picture 
is painted for us with more delicate skill 
and more lovely colours in the time of His 
contemporaries than in any succeeding age. 
What then must be our conclusion ? 

This light, that shines so brightly on the 
gospel page — this light, that illumines the 



ITS EVIDENCE TO CHRISTIANITY. 53 

sub-apostolic writings with such a soft and 
pious glow — this light, that began in the 
Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, and 
that has never since been quenched, is just 
the light from heaven, God's light enlight- 
ening the world. 

Reason here agrees with feeling. Careful 
search corroborates instinctive judgment. 
There is no possibility of the story of Christ 
having been altered before it reached us. 
No ingenuity can find any dark, unknown 
spot for its growth or change. From its 
first birth it has been the same. Testified 
to us by the men who knew the Lord Jesus, 
who had heard His teaching, who had seen 
Him dead, and seen Him risen — testified by 
them at peril of death — testified along with 
the most beautiful teaching to heart and 
conscience —testified so that the echoes of 
the story have rung through the world ever 
since, and have brought with them strength 
in life and hope in death wherever they have 
been listened to : testified thus, how can we 
possibly receive this story otherwise than 



54 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

as a true history of what actually happened 
— a history which an earlier writer than any 
which I have yet quoted has thus epitomized : 
"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among 
us ; and we beheld His glory, the glory as of 
the only begotten of the Father " ? 



LECTURE II. 



THE GRADUAL GROWTH OF THE NEW 
TESTAMENT CANON. 



By Rev. CANON WYNNE, D.D. 



LECTURE II. 



THE GRADUAL GROWTH OF THE NEW 
TESTAMENT CANON, 

T~\URING the reign of Diocletian, about 



J ~ > ^ the year AD. 303, there broke out a 
terrible persecution against Christianity, 
For some time the Church had had rest, 
Now the fire of heathen wrath blazed up 
for a little while against the religion that 
was rapidly conquering it. The edict went 
forth, that Christian churches were to be 
razed to the ground and Christian books 
were to be burned. The former persecutions 
had been directed against persons; this 
attack was levelled, not only against persons, 
but against books, Eusebius, the great 
historian of the early Church, thus describes 
the scenes of which he was an eye-witness : 




57 



58 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

" I saw with my own eyes the houses of 
prayer thrown down and razed to their 
foundations, and the inspired and sacred 
Scriptures consigned to fire in the open 
market place." Out of that time of trial 
and danger for the Christian community 
there arose a phrase - which carried with it 
important instruction for future ages — the 
phrase " canonical Scriptures." When Chris- 
tians were pressed on pain of torture and 
death to give up their sacred books, the 
question arose, which might they lawfully 
give up, and which was it imperative on 
them to keep ? Those who gave up the 
Scriptures were looked on by their fellow 
Christians as " traditores," traitors who had 
basely yielded up what they ought to have 
treasured as dearer than life. But all 
their books were not equally sacred. Some 
were good and instructive ; but some were 
much more than this, they contained the 
teaching of Christ's apostles. They had 
come straight from the fountain of truth. 
They were the guides of their faith and of 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON 



59 



their lives. The distinction had long been 
known and understood. But now the stern 
edict of heathen authority made it more 
important to have a definite " canon," or 
rule, by which timid Christians could be 
guided so as to be sure of the difference 
between good books and inspired books. 
Bitter controversies arose after that time as 
to the treatment of those who had been 
" traditores " ; and from the heat of those con- 
troversies the expression " canonical " issued 
as a general title for the apostolic writings. 
The word " canon " or " straight rule " had 
been used before with regard to right 
doctrine ; from the Diocletian persecution 
and the controversies with the Donatists it 
came to be used with regard to the books 
that were accepted by the Church as rightly 
belonging to the New Testament. Our task 
in this paper is to trace the growth of the 
idea expressed by the word " canon " from a 
general consciousness to a distinct registra- 
tion. 

I shall try to lay before you in a brief 



to- LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



sketch the history of the facts we know 
on the subject, and then to show you their 
bearing on the evidences for Christianity. 

I. As we considered the writings of the 
second century, though we recognised their 
identity, both in spiritual tone and doctrinal 
teaching, with the writings of the apostolic 
age, we noticed at the same time a great 
difference. They are marvellously inferior 
to the older writings, They do not at all 
approach to the breadth, depth, clearness, 
and dignity of the literature from which they 
have drawn so much, and which in a feeble 
way they re-echo. Amidst much that is 
precious and true, we see painful signs of 
narrow prejudices, and of the almost childish 
ways of reasoning and interpreting books, 
prevalent at the time. The difference be- 
tween the apostolic and the sub-apostolic 
writings is something like the difference 
between a nugget of pure gold and a block 
of quartz with veins of the precious metal 
gleaming through it. If we had to judge now 
by literary tests between the New Testament 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 61 



writings and all others that have come down 
to us from the early ages of Christianity ; if 
we had to judge which were most fitted to 
lead and mould human thought, which had 
least that was merely ephemeral and local, 
and most that was enduring and universal in 
their teaching, — I am certain that we should 
be forced to choose the very books that were 
gradually gathered together and set apart 
by the early Church in its canon of inspired 
Scripture. Still, it was not by literary tests, 
but by knowledge of facts that the Church 
chose. How their verdict was decided we 
have to consider. 

We must put aside speculation as to how 
we might think it likely a revelation would 
be given. The way it was given has not 
that complete and ready-made systematic 
form which we might have thought most 
convenient. Bishop Butler has shown from 
the analogy of nature how different from 
what might have been expected is the way 
the infinite and all-seeing God distributes 
His most precious gifts. Sensationalism and 



62 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



suddenness are generally alien from nature's 
processes. The great thing is to recognise 
the blessing and use it, though the way it 
came to us may not be what we should have 
looked for. It is hard to describe the first 
beginnings of the New Testament. 

" Who ever saw the earliest rose 
First open her sweet breast ? 
Or, when the summer sun goes down, 
The first soft star in evening's crown 
Light up her gleaming crest ? " 

So appeared that flower which has filled 
the earth with its fragrance, that star which 
has guided upwards for centuries the weary 
feet of humanity. It came not with obser- 
vation. 

The New Testament began its course in 
the solemn yet wonderfully fruitful period 
immediately after the Resurrection of Christ 
and the descent of the great Pentecostal gift. 
The apostles went forth everywhere " preach- 
ing Christ." They were joined by zealous 
coadjutors who shared their convictions. 

They went out first through Palestine and 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON 63 



Syria, then by degrees farther and farther 
into all the regions of the world as it was 
known at that time. The original form of 
their instructions was oral. They " preached 
the word." We rather shrink from the 
word " tradition," on account of the false 
ideas that have gathered round the term. 
But though we should be thankful for the 
security given to us by God's providence in 
the written word, which cannot change, yet 
the beginning of the New Testament was 
certainly the apostolic tradition — that which 
was handed on by the apostles from place 
to place and from Church to Church in 
their oral teaching. It was, as the writer of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews describes it, 
"the great salvation, which began to be 
spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto 
us by them that heard it." 

In the three synoptic gospels, St. Mat- 
thew, St Mark, and St. Luke, there are great 
general similarities, and yet continual dif- 
ferences. They come evidently from some 
common source, and yet not (as is suggested 



64 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



by many considerations) a common written 
source. Their relations one to another, their 
agreements and disagreements, can best be 
accounted for by supposing a common basis 
of oral teaching. This is like a key that fits 
and runs through complicated wards, and so 
is judged to be the right key. In those first 
few years the apostles, expecting the Lord's 
immediate return and the consummation 
of all things, had probably no intention to 
write histories of Christ. They did the duty 
that lay nearest to them, and preached the 
kingdom of heaven. The providence of God 
made a use of their preaching that they had 
probably not foreseen. In oral teaching, not 
in writing, their busy lives were spent. Their 
first preaching was almost necessarily in 
great part historical. They had important 
facts to narrate. They had a splendid story 
to unfold. So, in choosing a successor to the 
fallen Judas, the essential qualification was 
acquaintance with the facts of Christ's life 
from the first ; and the early discourses of 
St. Peter and St. John related in the Acts 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 65 



are plain declarations of the miracles, Death, 
and Resurrection of Christ. Now this kind 
of teaching would naturally fall before long 
into somewhat of a customary form and 
order. The same story having to be con- 
tinually told, would come to be told again 
and again in something of the same way. 
Certain parts of our Lord's life and teaching 
would come to be most often dwelt on. His 
Death and Resurrection would always be 
especially put forward. They formed the 
great basis of faith, so that whatever else had 
to be abbreviated or left out, sufficient time 
had always to be reserved for telling the 
whole story of the betrayal, crucifixion, and 
resurrection of the Lord. Details of the 
history would be varied by different persons 
and in different places ; but always the teach- 
ing would lead up to Calvary and the empty 
grave. So we have here, most probably, as 
far as we can judge by careful consideration 
of the likenesses and differences between 
them, the common basis of our synoptic 
gospels. We think of the various scenes 

5 



66 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



where the apostles preached : courts of the 
Jewish Temple, steps of Roman fortresses, the 
pillared porticoes of Grecian halls, guest- 
chambers in the houses of friends, upper 
rooms upon the third loft, shady spots beside 
flowing rivers — we think of the companions 
of Christ telling the old old story in such 
places, telling it over and over again, telling 
what they had seen and heard, telling others 
to tell the same. We think of little com- 
panies gathered together in villages and 
scattered houses as well as in great cities, 
repeating to one another what they had 
drunk in from the startling addresses of the 
apostles, we think of parents teaching the 
story to their children, and companies who 
were being made ready for baptism prepared 
and questioned in the same narrative. Thus 
began the collection and the order of apo- 
stolic teaching. St. Paul said to the Corin- 
thians (probably before St. Matthew and St. 
Luke were written), that he had " delivered 
to them what he had received," and it is 
almost word for word the same as is written 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 67 



in the gospels he had never seen. He 
earnestly calls upon Timothy to keep the 
" deposit " which was committed to him, 
evidently meaning the sacred treasure of true 
facts, which he was to hold pure and unmixed 
with " profane and vain babblings." 

St. Luke tells us that " many took in hand 
to draw up a narrative of the things that were 
fulfilled among us, even as they delivered 
them to us who were from the first eye-wit- 
nesses and ministers of the Word." He him- 
self wrote " in order " to Theophilus, that he 
might know the certainty of those things 
wherein he had been " catechised." 

Affection gradually strove to gather to- 
gether and preserve in writing the teaching 
that had fallen from inspired lips. By these 
efforts the providence of God prepared the 
materials for the histories of St. Matthew, 
St. Mark, and St. Luke. The histories were 
all the outcome of the apostles' witness. 
One of the histories has been considered 
from the earliest age to have been put to- 
gether by an apostle's hand. 



68 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



St. John's gospel was different. It was 
written by one who had survived the first 
struggling into the light of the new religion. 
It was written with a special teaching object, 
by one who had been favoured with the 
intimate friendship of our Lord. 

Perhaps the earliest written parts of the 
New Testament were letters — St. Paul's 
letters to the Churches he had founded, or in 
which he was deeply interested. Letters to 
individuals under special circumstances fol- 
lowed, or letters by other apostles or apostolic 
men, received with reverence and attention, 
and soon made the common property of the 
whole Christian society. A beautiful book 
describing the early history of the apostles, 
written by a companion of St Paul, the 
compiler of one of the gospels, appeared 
about the same time, and then the grand 
though mystic Apocalypse, handed down 
to us by the last surviving apostle of 
Christ. 

It is interesting to notice, that most of the 
New Testament books arose out of special 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 69 

circumstances, or were connected with special 
difficulties which the disciples of Christ were 
going through, or out of special occurrences 
among them. A great sin on the part of the 
member of one Church ; a collection for poor 
Christians in a crowded city ; the return of a 
runaway slave — incidents like these formed 
the immediate cause for the writing of letters 
that are a blessing and strength to Christ's 
people under all circumstances still. Thus 
a reality and life-like character are given to 
writings which God's providence prepared for 
the guidance of His people in every-day life. 
Certain controversies, too, which have now 
subsided or entirely changed their form, leave 
their traces deep on the apostolic letters. So, 
as in Miriam's song of triumph after the over- 
throw of the Egyptians, we have in our daily 
reading reminders of the struggles, dangers, 
and victories through which in times past our 
brethren have been led. 

None of these New Testament books were 
ushered in as books are now by publishers, 
by advertisements, by public announcements. 



70 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



They came as the violets come, springing up 
quietly in their due season, recognised by the 
fragrance they shed around them. That they 
did appear, that they were gathered and trea- 
sured by the Christian community is made 
certainly known to us by the way they are 
mentioned in the literature of succeeding ages. 

II. This brings us to the second part of our 
subject. So far we have been thinking of 
the production of the New Testament books. 
Now we have to think of their reception. 

In the age we were considering a short, 
time ago — the sub-apostolic — the traces of 
the knowledge and reception of the New 
Testament books are of a most interesting 
character. By their very unconsciousness, 
their absence of design in any way to mark 
or stamp the inspired books, they bear them 
the most reliable kind of testimony. The 
idea of any special canon or catalogue of 
books had not yet arisen. 

While some of the writers were still living, 
while in many of the Churches echoes of their 
living voices were still ringing, people had 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 71 



not thought of collecting and classifying their 
writings. They were circulating — slowly for 
the reasons I described in our last lecture — 
but with a quiet and steady advance through 
the Church. Handed on from one city to 
another ; read and re-read, and feasted on 
evidently by loving disciples in every direc- 
tion, their influence was forming the Church 
before it had time to realize the treasure it 
possessed in them. The New Testament 
books are seldom directly and accurately 
quoted by the sub-apostolic authors. They 
treat them much as they treat the Old 
Testament Scriptures. They embody their 
thoughts, using their words, sometimes as 
if quoted from memory, sometimes as if 
they were so familiar with them that their 
own thoughts naturally clothed themselves 
in almost identical language. With regard 
to the synoptic gospels, it is hard to be sure 
whether they are reproducing their words 
slightly altered by memory quotations, or 
whether rather their ideas and knowledge 
about the facts of Christ's history were formed 



72 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



on the same apostolic round of oral teaching 
which constituted the basis of those three 
gospels. 

With regard to the epistles, it is quite plain 
that they were familiar with a great many 
of them. I give you a few extracts from the 
writings of Clement, A.D. 95, and Polycarp, 
A.D. 112, in which you will recognise the 
evident presence of New Testament thoughts 
and the close similarity to New Testament 
words of which we have been speaking. 

" Ye were kind one to another, without 
grudging, being ready to every good work." 

" Let us consider what is good, and accept- 
able, and well-pleasing in the sight of Him 
that made us." 

"Abraham, who was called God's friend, 
was in like manner found faithful, inasmuch 
as he obeyed the commands of God." 

"Above all, remembering the words of the 
Lord Jesus, which He spake concerning 
equity and long suffering, saying, ' Be ye 
merciful, and ye shall obtain mercy ; forgive, 
and ye shall be forgiven; as ye do, so shall 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON 73 



it be done unto you ; as ye give, so shall it 
be given unto you ; as ye judge, so shall ye 
be judged ; as ye are kind to others, so shall 
God be kind to you ; with what measure ye 
mete, with the same shall it be measured to 
you again.' " 

" Let that be far from us which is written : 
' Miserable are the double-minded, and those 
who are doubtful in their hearts.' " 

" ' For God,' saith he, - resisteth the proud, 
but giveth grace to the humble.' " 

" By Him are the eyes of our hearts opened ; 
by Him our foolish and darkened understand- 
ing rejoiceth to behold His wonderful light." 

" ' Who, being the brightness of His glory, 
is by so much greater than the angels as He 
has by inheritance obtained a more excellent 
name than they.' For so it is written, ' Who 
maketh His angels spirits, and His ministers 
a flame of fire.' But to His Son, thus saith 
the Lord, c Thou art My Son, to-day have I 
begotten Thee.' ' Ask of Me, and I will give 
Thee the heathen for Thine inheritance, and 
the utmost parts of the earth for Thine 



74 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



inheritance.' And again He saith unto 
Him, ' Sit Thou on My right hand, until I 
make Thine enemies Thy footstool.' " 

"So likewise our apostles knew, by our 
Lord Jesus Christ, that there should con- 
tentions arise upon account of the ministry." 

"Wherefore are there strifes, and anger, and 
divisions, and schisms, and wars among us ? 
Have we not all one God and one Christ ? 
Is not one spirit of grace poured out among 
us all ? Have we not one calling in Christ ? " 

" Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, 
how He said, ' Woe to that man (by whom 
offences came) ! It were better for him that 
he had never been born, than that he should 
have offended one of My elect. It were 
better for him that a millstone should be 
hanged about his neck, and he should be 
cast into the sea, than that he should offend 
one of My little ones.' " 

" As also that the root of the faith, which 
was preached from ancient times, remains 
firm in you to this day, and brings forth fruit 
to our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered Him- 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 75 

self to be brought even to the death for our 
sins, ' whom God hath raised up, having 
loosed the pains of death': 'whom, having 
not seen ye love ; in whom, though now ye 
see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with 
joy unspeakable, and full of glory ' ; into 
which many desire to enter, knowing that 
' by grace ye are saved,' not by works, but 
by the will of God, through Jesus Christ." 

" ' Believing in Him that raised up our 
Lord Jesus from the dead, and hath given 
Him glory,' and a throne at His right hand ; 
to whom all things are made subject, 'both 
that are in heaven, and that are in earth. ' " 

"Abstaining from all unrighteousness, 
'inordinate affection, and love of money, 
from evil speaking, false witness ; not ren- 
dering evil for evil, railing for railing,' or 
striking for striking, or cursing for cursing ; 
but remembering what the Lord has taught 
us saying, 'Judge not, and ye shall not be 
judged ; forgive, and ye shall be forgiven. 
Be ye merciful, and ye shall obtain mercy ; 
for with the same measure that ye mete 



76 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



withal, it shall be measured to you again.' 
And again, ' Blessed are the poor, and they 
that are persecuted for righteousness sake : 
for theirs is the kingdom of God.' " 

" But ' the love of money is the root of 
all evil.' Knowing therefore that, as ' we 
brought nothing into this world, so neither 
may we carry anything out,' ' let us arm 
ourselves with the armour of righteousness.' 
For ' whosoever does not confess that Jesus 
Christ is come in the flesh, he is antichrist.' " 

" Let us return to the word thaj: was 
delivered to us from the beginning : ' watch- 
ing unto prayer,' and persevering in fasting ; 
with supplication beseeching the all-seeing 
God ' not to lead us into temptation,' as the 
Lord hath said, ' The spirit truly is willing, 
but the flesh is weak.' " 

" Being kind and gentle towards each 
other, despising none. When it is in your 
power to do good, defer it not ; for ' charity 
delivereth from death.' ' Be all of you sub- 
ject one to another, having your conver- 
sation honest among the Gentiles ' ; that by 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 77 



your good works, both ye yourselves may 
receive praise, and the Lord may not 4 be 
blasphemed through you.' " 

In the next half century of early Chris- 
tian history we have evidence of a rich and 
voluminous literature having been produced. 
But the greater part of it has perished, 
leaving us only the names of various writers, 
the subjects on which they wrote, and some 
fragments, large or small, of their works. 
One of the earliest and most prolific writers 
of this time was Papias, a friend of Poly- 
carp's. He was Bishop of Hierapolis, in 
Phrygia, early in the second century. Frag- 
ments of his many and important writings 
have been preserved for us in the history 
of Eusebius. He is the first extant writer 
who gives us the names of the authors of 
two of our gospels in a document dating 
about A.D. 130. 

" Matthew," Papias said, " wrote the oracles 
in the Hebrew tongue, and every one inter- 
preted them as he was able." " Mark, as the 
interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, 



78 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



though not in order, all that he remembered 
that was said or done by Christ. For he 
neither heard the Lord nor attended on 
Him, but later as I said, upon Peter, who 
taught according to the occasion, and not 
as composing a connected narrative of the 
Lord's discourses ; so that Mark made no 
mistake in writing down some things as he 
remembered them. For he took care of one 
thing, not to omit any of the particulars that 
he heard, or to falsify any part of them." 

About the same time as Papias lived 
one of the most important of our early 
Christian witnesses — Justin Martyr. He ap- 
pears to have been born before the close of 
the first century, and to have been martyred 
between A.D. 160 and A.D. 170. His prin- 
cipal writings date from c. 140 to c. 150. 
Three alone out of many have reached us — 
two apologies and the Dialogue with Try- 
pho. He quotes much as the elder writers 
do, inexactly and without reference, just as 
he quotes the Old Testament. The repro- 
ductions of the gospel story in his writings 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON 79 



are so numerous, that it has been calculated 
that if all our synoptic gospels were lost, 
a history of Christ substantially the same as 
theirs could be reconstructed out of Justin's 
writings. Besides this, he expressly mentions 
over and over again what he calls the 
" Memoirs of the Apostles," in which he 
found written "all things concerning Jesus 
Christ." In describing the Lord's Supper, 
for example, he says, " The apostles, in 
the memoirs made by them, handed down 
that it was thus enjoined to them." In the 
graphic picture he draws of the Christian 
services of his day, he mentions that the 
" memoirs of the apostles or writings of the 
prophets are read as long as time permits." 

Written a little later than Justin's book, 
there has come down to us a document to 
which was given at some time the inaccurate 
title of the Second Epistle of Clement. It 
was not written by the same author or in 
the same generation as the anonymous letter 
called the First Epistle of Clement. It can- 
not, however, bear a later date than the middle 



8o LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



of the second century. The author of it 
uses our gospels and several of our epistles 
in the same way as Justin does, reproducing 
the ideas of the New Testament writers, and 
clothing his thoughts in language that is 
evidently an echo from theirs. He speaks 
of the Scriptures under the title of "The 
Books of the Apostles." After quoting a 
passage of Isaiah with the same application 
of it as is made by St. Paul, he continues, 
" Moreover another Scripture saith, I came 
not to call righteous men, but sinners." 

In several other writers, some orthodox 
and some heterodox, about the same time, 
the middle of the second century and a little 
after, we see the same thing — evidence that 
their doctrines were formed on apostolic 
teaching, and that as apostolic they knew and 
used the writings that we read to-day. 

A further development now begins to show 
itself — a desire to express which are the real 
apostolic books, and to guard against un- 
authorized intruders. Strange to say, the 
first appearance of a list of New Testament 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON Si 



writings that we can lay our hands on is in 
the work of a heretic. The fact of his having 
made one for the use of his followers leads 
us to suppose that there were in existence 
others of which he disapproved. Marcion, 
one of the principal early second century here- 
tics, formed a collection of sacred books as the 
ground and test of his teaching. It consists 
of two parts, the " gospel " and " the apostoli- 
con." The gospel was that of St. Luke, with 
its text somewhat tampered with. The apo- 
stolicon consisted of ten epistles of St. Paul, 
Somewhat later than this, dating perhaps be- 
tween A.D. 1 60 and 170, we find a list of books 
generally accepted by the Christian Church. 
It is called the Muratorian Fragment. It was 
discovered in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, 
by Muratori, during the seventeenth century. 
There is reason to believe that it was brought 
to Milan from the old Irish monastery of Bob- 
bio. It is only a fragment. The beginning 
and end of it are torn away and lost. It begins 
with a broken sentence, which evidently refers 
to the position of St. Mark's gospel. The 

6 



82 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



writer goes on to say that " the gospel accord- 
ing to St. Luke stands third in order, having 
been written by Luke the physician, the com- 
panion of St. Paul." The fourth place is 
given to the gospel of St. John, a disciple of 
the Lord. He then says, " Though various 
ideas are taught in each of the gospels,, 
it makes no difference to believers, since in 
all of them all things are declared by one 
sovereign Spirit concerning the Nativity, the 
Passion, the Resurrection, the conversation 
[of our Lord] with His disciples, and His 
double advent, first in humble guise, which 
has taken place, and afterwards in royal 
power, which is still future." The writer next 
mentions the Acts, and thirteen epistles of 
St. Paul. After this he treats of books which 
are in circulation, but which, he says, " can- 
not be received into the Catholic Church ; 
for gall cannot be mingled with honey." But 
he mentions the Epistle of Jude, and 2nd 
John, and the Apocalypse of John, and Peter. 
" The latter," he says, " some of our body will 
not have read in the church." The document 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON 83 

is a translation. The writing is very fragmen- 
tary, and the text imperfect. But the author 
states, not his own individual opinion, but 
the knowledge and practice of the Catholic 
Church. Thus we see emerging from the 
misty morning clouds of that early age a 
catalogue of books received as apostolic, re- 
ceived as inspired. It is, on the whole, the 
same catalogue as we have to-day, though 
a few of our books were not yet quite 
universally known and recognised in the 
Church, and one or two still hovered , on the 
edge of the holy ground of canonicity, which 
the research and fuller knowledge of the next 
generation excluded. 

Another step we can mark in the progress 
of the canon, amidst the dim shadows, is the 
making of versions. Two have come down 
to us from the second century. First, the 
ancient Syriac " Peshito," or simple trans- 
lation, as it is called. There are many diffi- 
culties in identifying its first form and the 
date of its appearance. But we may safely 
conclude that it was made in the earlier half 



84 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



of the second century, that it had a very wide 
circulation, that it included our present books 
with the exception of 2nd and 3rd John, 
2nd Peter, Jude, and the Apocalypse, with 
regard to which books there were consider- 
able differences of opinion in the early 
ages. 

Secondly, the " old Latin," also called a 
Peshito or simple version, may have been 
made a few years later. But it was used by 
Tertullian, who began to write about A.D. 190. 
It was an old and long-used version in his 
time. Twenty years would bring it back 
to 170, which is the latest date that could 
with any probability be assigned to it. 
Putting these two ancient versions together 
as representing the united witness of the 
East and West, we find shortly after the 
middle of the second century, treasured 
up, translated, and passed on from Church 
to Church as apostolic and inspired, all 
the books of our New Testament with the 
exception of 2nd Peter, and none but those 
which we acknowledge. 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 85 

About the third quarter of this same second 
century appeared a remarkable document, on 
which one of the lecturers who is to follow 
me has written a valuable treatise. I refer to 
Tatian's Diatessaron, i.e. "By the four." It 
is a kind of synopsis or harmony of the four 
gospels, and was widely used for public read- 
ing in the Syrian Churches. Though Tatian 
was the leader of a heretical sect, yet the 
materials out of which the Diatessaron was 
composed are the four gospels received by 
the Church Catholic. 

And now we emerge out of the clouds and 
come into the clear daylight of well-defined 
history. At the close of the second century 
several voluminous and brilliant writers 
flourished in the Church, and from this time 
forward Christian authors were so able and 
so numerous, and the Christian community 
became such an important factor in human 
history, that it is easy to know her ideas and 
her beliefs. 

Iren<zus was brought up in Asia Minor, and 
became bishop of Lyons in Gaul about A D. 



86 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY, 



177, succeeding - the aged Pothinus, who was 
born ten or fifteen years before the end ot 
the first century. At the same time we have 
the well-known Clement of Alexandria, the 
Latin Father Tertullian in the Church of 
Carthage, North Africa, and the noble and 
zealous Origen, " adamantine," as has been 
well said, in his courage, and unrivalled in 
his universal learning and his deep study of 
the Scriptures old and new. 

From the time of these writers to the time 
of Eusebius, in the reign of Diocletian, the 
history of the canon may best be described 
through the phraseology Eusebius uses. He 
describes three classes of books. First, the 
acknowledged ; second, the disputed ; third, 
the spurious. At the close of the second 
century, what he calls the acknowledged 
books had been all generally recognised in 
the Church as apostolic. They were the four 
gospels, thirteen epistles of St. Paul, 1st John, 
and 1st Peter. 

There were others which he classed as dis- 
puted, 2nd and 3rd John, Jude, Hebrews, 2nd 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 



87 



Peter, and strange to say, a book that was. 
quoted by the very earliest writers — the 
Apocalypse. At the close of the second 
century, these were known and acknowledged 
in some parts of the Church, doubted or not 
mentioned in others. With the progress of 
inter-communion between the Churches in 
the third century, all these gradually became 
known, their claims to canonicity were under- 
stood, and they became by degrees more 
and more generally received as genuine and 
apostolic. A number of other books there 
were, some of them (like the Shepherd of 
Hennas) pious and genuine, but not apostolic ; 
some of them dishonest endeavours by 
heretics to strengthen their opinions by 
honoured names. These, at the close of the 
second century, were classified as Scripture 
by some writers, disowned or ignored by 
others. The progress of knowledge and 
reasonable criticism in the third century was 
to put them all aside. 

Thus the acknowledged books were all 
preserved, the needlessly doubted were es- 



88 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



tablished, and the spurious were rejected. 
And at the time when a definite canon had 
to be drawn up during the Diocletian perse- 
cution, the list of inspired books had been 
long fully formed, and weeded of unau- 
thorized intruders. Thus, at the General 
Council of Nicsea, A.D. 325, the New Testa- 
ment, as we have it to-day, was the basis of 
all argument 

III. Having thus far considered together 
the production of the New Testament books, 
their reception into the Christian community, 
and the jealous care taken lest any not really 
apostolic should creep in among them, we 
are in a position to see how these facts bear 
on our Christian faith. We have observed 
how first there was belief in Christ, then the 
preached word about Christ, and then gra- 
dually the written word about Him. The 
word sprang from the belief, and then perpe- 
tuated and guided the belief. By the belief, 
so preserved and made known, the Church 
was formed and gathered together, and the 
Church in her turn became the witness and 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 89 

keeper of the teaching by which her faith 
was guided. 

Thus our study leads us to two results — to 
be cautious as to the foundation of our faith, 
and yet to be sure of it. 

The caution is, that we are not to consider 
our faith to rest on a book, but on a Person. 
Christ Himself, the Rock of ages, is the 
foundation. Our belief in Christ does not 
rest upon the inspiration of the New Testa- 
ment, but our belief in that inspiration rests 
on our belief in Christ. Various converging 
arguments make us sure that the history of 
Christ's career and teaching told in the New 
Testament is not invented, not imagined, 
not developed, but actually true. This con- 
clusion is independent of our belief in the 
inspiration of the books. We take the New 
Testament writers hrst merely as witnesses. 
-We trace up the unbroken line of testimony 
to what Christians believed till we find it ori- 
ginated in the witness of Christ's companions, 
who told, at peril of life, what they had seen 
and heard. Through this witness we are led 



9o LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



to believe in the supernatural character of 
His teaching and work. We are not affected 
in this belief by any supposed defect in the 
apostolic writings. Even if we could not 
reconcile all the details of the^r statements 
one with another, even if we did not agree 
with every sentiment they expressed, still we 
feel that their evidence is reliable, is irre- 
sistible. They could not have been deceived 
about what they saw and heard. They could 
not have wished to deceive. It is out of the 
question. As we read what is conveyed in 
the various histories, letters, and exhortations 
forming the apostolic literature, we are con- 
vinced that it is genuine and unimpeachable 
testimony to the awful and yet glorious facts 
on which our faith in the crucified and risen 
Saviour rests. 

Thus each scriptural difficulty does not 
harass us as a life or death danger to our 
belief. It is a difficulty, not as to the truth of 
our creed, but as to the nature and degree 
of the guidance given to the writers who 
embody our creed. If the character of Christ 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 91 



is truly drawn, if His teaching is on the 
whole faithfully preserved, then we have His 
Life as our pattern, His Death as our Re- 
demption, His Resurrection as the pledge of 
our immortality, even though we had to 
suppose that the witnesses were not gifted 
with infallibility. So our faith does not 
tremble in the balance with every puzzle in 
scriptural interpretation. The several hands 
that drew Christ's picture, the several 
witnesses that preserved His teaching, have 
made us know Him as He really was. They 
supplement each other. They balance each 
other ; their very variations in detail cor- 
roborate their general testimony. 

But if the study of the canon makes us 
cautious as to the foundation of our faith, 
still more does it make us sure of it. It 
shows us the wonderful precautions taken 
to keep the witness, the love with which it 
was cherished, the care with which it was 
sifted, the determination with which all that 
was not reliable was put aside. Thus we are 
made sure of the genuineness of what was 



92 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

kept. If anything could show us the 
watchful guardianship of God's providence 
over His Church it is the phenomena pre- 
sented by the growth of the canon. I dare 
say you are all familiar with the story of an 
Italian nobleman who, during the stern reign 
of Napoleon, underwent a long imprison- 
ment. He had drunk deep of the cold 
rationalism of the eighteenth century, and 
went to prison an atheist. As he paced his 
little court he noticed one day a slight dis- 
turbance of its hard clay floor. Then in a 
few days a glistening point pushed itself up 
through the clay and mortar. As these 
rough impediments were got over, the hard 
sheath opened out, and a delicate plant shot 
up into the air. The prisoner watched from 
day to day with deep interest the growth 
of the little plant, the expanding of leaves 
that had been daintily folded in their pro- 
tecting case, the issuing of a carefully 
covered bud, which opened out, petal after 
petal, into a lovely flower, with provision in 
its calyx for the infinite renewal of the plant's 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 93 

life. And through the teaching of this " lily 
of the field " the atheist left his prison a 
believer in his Father's wisdom and his 
Father's love. Have we not a similar lesson 
as we watch the growth and progress of the 
plant that has blossomed so beautifully and 
borne such precious fruit of world-teaching 
knowledge? Think of this "good thing 
coming out of Nazareth. 7 ' Think of the 
circumstances through which it emerged — 
the rude, ignorant, and tumultuous people 
among whom its first readers and writers 
lived ; the fierce prejudices, the fanatic hatred, 
the mingled scorn and persecution through 
which it had to push its way. Think of the 
difficulties of copying, preserving, and trans- 
mitting the fragmentary writings. Think of 
the enemies outside the Church, the rival 
parties within, the scantiness of knowledge 
everywhere. Think of how steadily, quietly 
this holy literature came into being as it 
was needed, pushed aside all entangling and 
misleading growths, extended its branches, 
opened out its blossoms, and shed forth its 



94 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



fragrance till the whole Church could feel 
its beauty and feed on its fruitage. Think 
of all this as you read the calm, beautiful 
verses of the New Testament, and then say 
if you can that there is there no sign of the 
presence and working of " a Power not our- 
selves that makes for righteousness." 

With two thoughts I now draw this paper 
to its conclusion, (i) I have said, that for 
the foundation of our faith we rely, not on 
the inspiration, but on the witness of the 
New Testament writers. But in that very 
witness their inspiration is really implied. 
For they witness that Jesus was the Son of 
God, and that He commissioned and by His 
Holy Spirit guided certain apostles to carry 
His teaching into the world. And all the 
care and discrimination we saw exercised 
by the early Church about the canonical 
writings turned on one point — a matter of 
fact, not of opinion — their apostolicity. The 
spurious were rejected, the disputed were 
established, the acknowledged were cherished 
— all according to the one test, Were they 



THE NEW TESTAMENT CANON. 95 



or were they not " genuine documents of the 
apostolic age, containing the substance of the 
apostolic testimony"? Therefore, as we read 
the New Testament, we can be sure that we 
are reading what was taught by the apostles 
of the Lord Jesus. We need not puzzle 
ourselves as to theories of inspiration, as to 
the exact way in which the Divine and 
human elements were blended, as to how 
far the celestial melody was affected by the 
various voices which took it up and sang it. 
We know all that we really want to know. 
We know that, as we read our New Testa- 
ment, we are sitting at the feet of the men 
whom Jesus sent forth to teach in His name, 
and to whom He promised that the Holy 
Ghost would guide them into all truth. 

(2) Once more, as we saw in our last lecture 
that the best way to appreciate the planet's 
glory is to look at its shining, so now we 
may say, that to appreciate the beauty and 
fragrance of this New Testament flower, the 
best way is to look at it steadfastly and 
breathe in its sweetness. If the clearest 



96 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



proof of Christianity is Christ, so the clearest 
proof of the inspiration of Scripture is Scrip- 
ture itself. Its effect on the human heart and 
human conscience is a permanent miracle. 

Read your New Testament with attention, 
with sympathy, with prayer. Read it some- 
times rapidly, to catch its general spirit, 
sometimes thoughtfully, verse by verse, to 
appreciate the delicate shades of its mean- 
ing ; and as you find in it always something 
to meet the needs of your, nature, probings to 
the depths of your conscience to convince 
you of sin, pictures of your Father and 
Saviour, promises of His pity and pardon 
to calm your fear, lofty ideals of life to stir 
you to exertion, strong motives to nerve you 
in battle against temptation, consolations to 
soothe you in sorrow, and promises that 
make all life bright as the beginning of 
heaven — as thus you study the canonical 
writings, you need hardly any other witness 
to convince you that " the gospel is the 
power of God unto salvation, to the Jew 
first, and also to the Gentile." 



LECTURE III. 

THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 
By Rev. J. H. BERNARD. B.D. 



LECTURE III. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 

T T has been sometimes suggested by per- 
sons to whom the presence of the super- 
natural element in history is distasteful, that 
the books of the New Testament, and espe- 
cially our four canonical Gospels, are but 
the product of that myth-making tendency 
which has frequently manifested itself among 
peoples of imperfect culture. Legends, we 
are told, always group themselves about any 
great personage after his life-work has been 
accomplished ; and it is in accordance with 
this law of the evolution of myth that our 
Gospels came to be written and received in 
the- Christian community. There are many 
reasons which forbid us from accepting such 
a theory as an adequate account of the pro- 



ioo LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



duction of those sacred books, which are the 
most precious inheritance of Christendom ; 
I propose to point out here only one line 
of argument, which will, I believe, furnish a 
satisfactory answer to most minds. And it 
is this. It so happens that we are in pos- 
session of a number of books written in the 
early centuries with the intention of improv- 
ing on the picture of our Lord's life drawn 
by the evangelists, and embodying a col- 
lection of legends which from time to time 
had grown up. These are generally called 
The Apocryphal Gospels. Here, then, we have 
samples of what the myth-making spirit of 
primitive Christianity actually accomplished ; 
if the canonical Gospels had grown up in the 
same way, we may be quite sure that there 
would be a marked similarity between the 
two classes of writings. If they were all 
produced under the same conditions, as the 
expression of the same pious interest, for the 
same object of the edification of the Christian 
Church, we should naturally expect that they 
would be of the same general character and 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 101 

— within certain limits, inasmuch as they deal 
with the same subject — instinct with the 
same attractiveness and beauty. On the 
other hand, if we find (as I believe we shall 
find) that no words are strong enough to 
express the contrast which exists both in 
form and in spirit between the inspired writ- 
ings of the evangelists and these miserable 
legends, we shall be forced to believe that 
the mythological capacities of the early cen- 
turies were not sufficient to produce the 
former, and that their origin must be traced 
to a higher source. 

It may be well, in the first place, to remind 
ourselves what is implied in the phrase 
"apocryphal gospels." They are not to be 
confounded with the apocryphal books of 
the Old Testament that are often bound up 
with our Bibles ; these are described in our 
Sixth Article as, though not applicable to 
the establishment of doctrine, yet " read 
for example of life and instruction of man- 
ners," but no one is likely to make such 
a claim for the books of which we are 



io2 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



now speaking. They are simply lives of our 
Lord which acquired a certain circulation in 
the early centuries, of uncertain authorship 1 
and possessed of no official character. Ire- 
naeus tells us that in his day "an unspeakable 
number " of such books was known to exist. 
The causes which elicited them were very 
various. Some were written to gratify a 
pious curiosity ; there was a desire to know 
something more of our Lord's life than is 
revealed in Holy Scripture, and so the 
demand created the supply. In these the 
popular legends of the locality would be 
naturally incorporated. Others were com- 
posed in the interest of different forms of 
heresy, which, finding no sufficient support 
in the words of Scripture, were fain to invent 
Scriptures for themselves. These latter have 
chiefly perished, and we only know them by 
repute and by a few fragments that are pre- 
served in patristic literature ; any that have 
lived have apparently been polished and 

1 " Ouarum occulta origo non claruit patribus." — 
Aug., De Civ. Dei, xv. 23. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 103 



pruned by successive editors of unimpeach- 
able orthodox}-. Many of these "gospels' 1 
are palpably forgeries, for they claim the 
name of an author to which it is demon- 
strable that they have no right ; e.g., the 
Gospel of Kicodemus (in its present form 
at least) was certainly not written by its 
nominal author, nor could the Gospel of 
fames have been composed by either of the 
apostles of that name. And yet these books 
are not behindhand in putting forward their 
authority to be heard ; both the Arabic Gos- 
pel of the Infancy 1 and the Protevangel of 
fames- laying express claim to inspiration. 
Bishop Ellicott gives the following recipe for 
making an apocryphal gospel. " To one part 
of ancient traditions add five parts of pious 
fraud and about as much of crude heresy ; 
flavour with Docetism, Xestorianism, or 
Eutychianism, according to taste ; mix in- 

1 At the beginning, " Auxiliante et favente summo 
numine incipimus scribere librum miraculorum." 

2 In one MS. at end: a Qe6u tou 86vrd fioi rrjv dcopeau 
kcu rrjv crocpiav tov ypd-^ai TTjv laropiav Tav-rqv.''' 



104 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

timately, and spread thinly on parchment." 1 
It must not then be forgotten that all these 
books are admitted by every one to be 
spurious and untrustworthy, — in many places 
grotesque and irreverent ; there is no ques- 
tion whatever as to their unhistorical char- 
acter. It is just possible that grains of true 
history may here and there be embedded in 
masses of rubbish ; but we are quite without 
the means of distinguishing the true from the 
false. For obvious reasons the quotations 
here given will not by themselves give a fair 
idea of the extreme puerility of these docu- 
ments, for much would be too unpleasantly 
grotesque to set down on paper. 

The first thing that strikes us in looking 
over the apocryphal gospels is that their 
authors have chosen for their literary activity 
periods as to which the canonical history is 
silent. None of them gives an account of 
our Lord's public ministry ; the contrast with 
the genuine Gospels would thus have been 
rendered too striking. They may be roughly 
1 Cambridge Essays for 1856, p. 182. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 105 

divided into two classes — those which deal 
with our Lord's infancy and with the family 
history of the virgin mother ; and those 
which profess to give some account of our 
Lord's descent to Hades and the underworld 
after His crucifixion. Scripture being almost 
altogether silent on these subjects, the means 
of detecting the falsehood of the legends were 
not so available. 

With reference to the first class, the most 
readable and interesting is called the P rot- 
evangel of James, probably by a Jew of that 
name. The points of contact between this 
and Justin Martyr seem to show that in some 
form — though not necessarily in its present 
form — it existed in the second century. It is 
the earliest repertory of ecclesiastical tradi- 
tions respecting the Virgin Mary, and is not 
unlike a modern novel on sacred subjects. 
Somewhat longer and more fanciful, but 
derived from the same sources, is a gospel 
falsely attributed to St. Matthew, and with 
equal falsehood said to have been translated 
by St. Jerome from the Hebrew. And a still 



io6 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



rater, though somewhat more sober, recension 
of the same materials is the Latin Gospel of 
the Nativity of Mary, which was incorporated 
almost entire into the Golden Legend of the 
Middle Ages. The influence which these 
writings have exercised down to our own 
day is very considerable. The Roman 
Church, though condemning them as spu- 
rious, can yet point to no other source for 
certain legends which are incorporated in the 
Breviary. Thus, the traditional names of 
the parents of the Virgin Mary, Joachim and 
Anna, are venerated in the Roman Church 
still ; even nearer home we have traces of 
this mediaeval belief. We have a St. Anne's 
Church in Dublin — no doubt, with an ori- 
ginal, though perhaps unconscious, reference 
to the name preserved in the Protevangel of 
fames ; and the familiar collocation of Chris- 
tian names, Mary Anne, is possibly to be 
traced to the same source. Again, there is 
here a long account of the presentation of 
the Virgin when a child in the Temple, an 
event which is still commemorated by the 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 107 

Church of Rome. And, speaking generally, 
these three works are chiefly taken up with 
minute details tending to that glorification of 
the virgin mother which afterwards did so 
much to corrupt primitive Christianity. 

It is interesting, however, to note how 
greatly these legends have influenced sacred 
art. A subject which has occupied several 
painters and which is best known from Peru- 
gino's famous picture is the Marriage of the 
Virgin. The story on which the pictures 
are founded is, that it being determined by 
the elders that Mary, — who had been dedi- 
cated to God by Anna, — should be betrothed 
to some pious man, perplexity arose as to 
the most appropriate suitor. Accordingly 
we read : " The angel of the Lord came to 
Zacharias and said, Go forth, and call to- 
gether all the widowers among the people, 
and let every one of them bring his rod ; and 
he by whom the Lord shall show a sign shall 
be the husband of Mary. And the criers went 
out through all Judaea, and the trumpets of 
the Lord sounded, and all the people ran and 



ioS LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



met together. Joseph also, throwing away 
his axe, went out to meet them ; and when 
they met together, they went to the high 
priest, taking every man his rod. After the 
high priest had received their rods he went 
into the Temple to pray ; and when he had 
finished his prayer, he took the rods and 
went forth and distributed them, and there 
was no miracle attending them. The last 
rod was taken by Joseph, and, behold, a dove 
proceeded out of the rod and flew upon the 
head of Joseph," 1 who was accordingly se- 
lected as the future guardian of the Virgin. 
We quote this story because it explains those 
pictorial representations of the Marriage of 
the Virgin, so common in mediaeval art, in 
which Joseph is depicted as an old man with 
a green bough and a dove, and the dis- 
appointed suitors are represented as breaking 
their rods. The number of these pictures 
shows how enduring an impression this 
legend left on the mind of Christendom. 
The idea of the miraculous test mentioned 
1 Protev. of James, 8. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 109 

was no doubt borrowed from the budding 
of Aaron's rod. 

Another illustration which is even more 
familiar may be derived from the Gospel of 
the Pseudo-Matthew, in which the scene of 
our Lord's Nativity is depicted as a cave, 
which became illuminated with a heavenly 
brightness by the presence of the Light of 
the world. On the third day after His 
birth, so the legend goes, the Holy Family 
removed themselves to a stable where an ox 
and an ass were sheltered — the animals in 
their adoration of the infant Saviour fulfilling 
the prophet's words : " The ox knoweth his 
owner, and the ass his master's crib " (Isa. i. 
3). 1 Very fanciful and far-fetched, no doubt ; 
but mark how this idea, that an ox and an 
ass shared the same roof with our Lord, has 
come down through the centuries. It is con- 
stantly alluded to in mediaeval sermons ; a 
well-known old Latin carol refers to it in 
the lines : 

" Cognovit bos et asinus. quod puer erat Dominus." 



1 Reference is also made to the LXX. version of 
Hab. iii. 2. 



wo LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



There is hardly a picture, ancient or modern, 
of the scene of the Nativity which does not 
introduce these animals ; they are constantly 
represented on Christmas cards. And in a 
familiar little book which is still used for 
children, and which many of us doubtless 
read in extreme youth — The Peep of Day — 
the good authoress has given a wide currency 
to the legend. " There were," she says, "cows 
and asses in the stable," apparently not being 
conscious that she is quoting from a legend 
of the second century, and that her assertion 
has no scriptural authority. 

In this Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew much 
matter is added concerning the flight into 
Egypt, of a most extraordinary and in- 
credible kind. For example, while the Holy 
Family are journeying they enter a cave 
which proves to be tenanted with dragons. 
The dragons do not injure them, but worship 
the Divine Child, thus fulfilling the injunction 
of the psalmist : " Praise the Lord from the 
earth, ye dragons, and all deeps " (Ps. cxlviii. 
7). Lions and panthers do the same j the 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. in 



lions being also used as beasts of burden. 
Then comes another episode celebrated in 
art, known as the Bowing of the Palm. A 
palm tree is made to bend to yield up its 
fruit, and to disclose a spring of water at its 
roots. As a reward, one of its branches is 
borne away by an angel to be planted in 
Paradise. The Holy Family next lodge in 
a temple in Egypt, where the idols fall in 
ruin to the ground ; the governor of the 
country and the people are consequently led 
to believe in Christ. This last story is al- 
luded to as authentic by Athanasius. 1 

But even these legends seem sober and 
plausible beside the stories which are told 
of our Lord's boyhood in this same docu- 
ment and in another " Gospel of the In- 
fancy " which is attributed to St. Thomas 
the apostle, of which I have not yet spoken. 
This Gospel of Thomas is mentioned by 
Irenseus ; and if the others from which we 
have quoted deal chiefly with fictitious inci- 
dents in the life of the virgin mother, this 
1 Oratio de Incarii. Verbi, p. 62. 



U2 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



is full of miracles said to have been wrought 
by her Divine Son. Of their character we 
shall be able to judge in a moment ; but it 
appears plain that this account of them was 
composed with a distinct heretical bias ; the 
object of the original writer (who perhaps 
was a Gnostic of the second century) seems 
to have been to represent our Lord's man- 
hood and growth in wisdom as quite unreal ; 
and His human nature and development are 
in consequence quite overshadowed by the 
superhuman majesty of His child-life. To 
take a few examples : 

When the Lord was a child, it is said that 
He one Sabbath day made twelve sparrows 
out of clay, a number of other children being 
with Him. ''When therefore one of the 
Jews had seen him doing this, he said to 
Joseph : Joseph, dost thou not see the child 
Jesus working on the Sabbath at what is 
not lawful for him to do? for He has made 
twelve sparrows of clay. And when Joseph 
heard this, he reproved him, saying : Where- 
fore dost thou on the Sabbath such things as 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 113 

are not lawful for us to do ? And when Jesus 
heard Joseph, he struck his hands toge- 
ther and said to his sparrows, Fly ! And 
at the voice of his command they began 
to fly. And in the sight and hearing of all 
that stood by he said to the birds : Go and 
fly through the earth and through all the 
world, and live. And when those that were 
there saw such miracles, they were filled 
with great astonishment.'' 1 This story pene- 
trated even to Iceland. It has been found 
in a collection of Icelandic legends, where 
it is entitled, The Saviour and the Golden 
Plovers? 

Or again : "Now Jesus was six years old, 
and his mother sent him with a pitcher to 
the fountain to draw water with the children. 
And it came to pass after he had drawn the 
water that one of the children came against 
him and struck the pitcher and broke it. 
But Jesus stretched out the cloak which he 
had on, and took up in it as much water as 

1 Pseudo-Matt., 27. 

2 See Cowper's Apocryphal Gospels, p. xxxii. 

8 



ii4 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



there had been in the pitcher, and carried it 
to his mother." 1 

Or again : " And his father was a carpen- 
ter, and at that time made ploughs and 
yokes. And a certain rich man ordered him 
to make him a couch. And one of the cross 
pieces being too short, they did not know 
what to do. Then the child Jesus said to 
his father Joseph, Put down the two pieces 
of wood, and make them even in the middle. 
And Joseph did as the child said to him. 
And Jesus stood at the other end, and took 
hold of the shorter piece of wood, and 
stretched it, and made it equal to the other. 
And his father Joseph saw it, and wondered, 
and embraced the child, and kissed him, say- 
ing, Blessed am I, because God has given me 
this child." 2 

Or lastly, not to multiply these idle tales : 
on two occasions the Divine Child is repre- 
sented as using His superhuman power in 
the wantonness of cruelty for the purpose of 

1 Pseudo-Matt., 33. 

2 Thomas, 13. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 115 

revenging Himself on His little playmates 
for their offences against Him. "A boy, a 
worker of iniquity," it is said, " ran up and 
came against the shoulder of Jesus, wishing 
to make sport of him, or to hurt him if he 
could. And Jesus said to him : Thou shalt 
not go back safe and sound from the way 
that thou goest. And immediately he fell 
down and died. And the parents of the 
dead boy, who had seen what had happened, 
cried out, saying, Where does this child come 
from?" and they complained to Joseph. 
And after some delay the Lord restored the 
boy again to life. 1 

Upon this characteristic of the apocryphal 
gospels, that they are full of accounts of the 
miracles of our Lord's infancy, a few words 
should be said. In the first place, all such 
legends seem directly to contradict St. John's 
words in the second chapter of his gospel. 
"This beginning of miracles did Jesus in 
Cana of Galilee," writes the evangelist, in 
reference to the miracle of the water that 
1 Pseudo-Matt., 29. 



n6 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



was turned into wine at the wedding feast, 
which implies (it has been plausibly argued) 
that our Lord's boyhood had not been sig- 
nalised by any such manifestations of His 
superhuman origin as the apocryphal gospels 
assign to Him. And the general contrast 
between the economy of miracle (if one may 
so speak) apparent in the New Testament 
and the prodigality of miracle in the legends 
is very striking. St. Mark notes (vi. 5), that 
on one occasion in Galilee, our Lord "could 
there do no mighty work, save that He laid 
His hands upon a few sick folk, and healed 
them " ; but the writers of the apocryphal 
gospels never regard any incident as satis- 
factorily told until it has been embellished 
with marvel. Even more important is it to 
notice the contrast in the character of the 
true and the false miracles. Those of the 
legends are mere vulgar wonders, like the 
tricks of a thaumaturgist ; they have no 
moral significance, they convey no lesson. 
The miracles of the New Testament are 
really acted parables : they are not only 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 117 



wonders, they are also signs ; they are the 
works of Him who displays His almighty 
power most chiefly in showing mercy and 
pity. But the alleged miracles of the infancy 
are purposeless and wanton, even when they 
are not deliberately cruel. There is an 
absence of dignity about them, for they are 
worked without any great or worthy object. 
So then, even if we did not know that the 
stories which have been cited are valueless 
as history, being simply legends and myths 
of which we can trace the development, we 
should be led to suspect as much from the 
character of what they have to tell. It has 
often been pointed out, that in many features 
the alleged patristic miracles were markedly 
inferior to those of the New Testament. 
Perhaps the most significant of these differ- 
ences is this, that the true test of a genuine 
miracle is a moral test ; if the miracle sub- 
serves not a worthy purpose, if it be unfruit- 
ful in any good result, if the teaching by 
which it is accompanied be not spiritually 
elevating, then it stands self-condemned. 



n8 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



And that is precisely the case with the 
miracles attributed to our Lord in the Gospels 
of the Infancy. Other contrasts may here 
fitly be touched upon. The apocryphal 
gospels are entirely devoid of moral teaching, 
whether in the form of parable or otherwise. 
" Again, they hardly recognise the office of 
prophecy ; they make no reference to the 
struggles of the Church with the old forms of 
sin and evil reproduced from age to age till 
the final regeneration of all things. History 
in them becomes a mere collection of tradi- 
tions, and is regarded neither as the fulfilment 
of the past nor as the type of the future." 1 

Many of these stories were eagerly assimi- 
lated by Mohammedanism. For example, we 
find in the Koran accounts of Mary being 
devoted to God by Anna, and of her being 
sustained during her sojourn in the Temple 
by divinely sent fruits ; of our Lord speaking 
while yet in His cradle, and of His manufac- 
ture of living sparrows out of mud. 2 These 

1 Westcott. Int7:oditctio?i to Gospels, p. 479. 

2 Sale's Koran, iii. 48, v. 119. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 119 



and similar legends probably reached Maho- 
metans through the medium of a document 
distinct from any of those yet cited, called 
the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, which is 
said to be still in some repute among the 
Nestorians of Syria. The date of its com- 
position is uncertain, but it seems to be a 
late compilation, probably as late as the fifth 
century. It adds some touches which betray 
its Eastern origin. It tells that the coming 
of the wise men who were led by the star 
to the infant Saviour was predicted by 
Zoroaster, the Eastern sage ; and in addi- 
tion to nearly all the prodigies recorded in 
the earlier apocrypha, it has many peculiar 
to itself, especially in connexion with the 
flight into Egypt During this journey many 
miracles are recounted as having happened. 
In one city a demoniac young woman is 
healed, out of whom Satan departs in a form 
possibly (as Bishop Ellicott remarks) only 
too common — in the form of a young man. 
On another occasion the travellers meet three 
women journeying, and with tbem a mule 



i2o LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



richly caparisoned, on which they bestow 
much affection. It appears on inquiry that 
the mule is their brother, who has been be- 
witched. When they hear of the prodigies 
which have accompanied the travels of the 
Holy Family they ask for help. "We beseech 
thee, therefore, they said, to have pity upon 
us. Then, grieving at their lot, the Lady 
Mary took up the Lord Jesus and put him 
on the mule's back ; and she wept as well 
as the women, and said to Jesus Christ : 
Alas! my son, heal this mule by thy mighty 
power, and make him a man endowed with 
reason as he was before. And when these 
words were uttered by the Lady Mary, his 
form was changed, and the mule became a 
young man free from every defect." 1 

The Eastern origin of this tale is apparent 
in every line ; it reminds us of the stories in 
the Arabian Nights, with which it is on a par 
in point of sobriety. 

An anecdote not quite so grotesque fol- 
lows close upon the last. "They come in 
1 Chap. 21. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 121 



their journey to a desert, and hearing that it 
was infested by robbers, Joseph and Mary 
resolve to cross this region by night. But as 
they go along, behold, they see two robbers 
lying in the way, and along with them a 
great multitude of robbers who are their 
associates, sleeping. Now these two robbers 
into whose hands they have fallen are Titus 
and Dumachus. Titus therefore says to 
Dumachus : I beseech thee to let these 
persons go freely, and so that our comrades 
may not see them. And as Dumachus re- 
fuses, Titus says to him again : Take to thy- 
self forty drachmas from me, and hold this 
as a pledge. At the same time he holds out 
to him the belt which he had had about his 
waist, to keep him from opening his mouth 
or speaking. And the Lady Mary, seeing 
that the robber had done them a kindness, 
says to him : The Lord God will sustain 
thee by His right hand, and will grant thee 
remission of thy sins. And the Lord Jesus 
answering says to his mother : Thirty years 
hence, O my mother, the Jews will crucify 



\i2 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



mc at Jerusalem, and these two robbers will 
be raised upon the cross along with me, Titus 
on my right hand and Dumachus on my left ; 
and after that day Titus shall go before me 
into Paradise. And she said, God keep this 
from thee, my son. And they went thence 
towards a city of idols, which on their ap- 
proach was changed into sandhills." 1 This 
and several other stories from the apocry- 
phal gospels are familiar to English readers 
from being incorporated in Longfellow's 
Golden Legend. Another romance of equally 
good authority, however, represents the names 
of the two thieves as Dismas and Gestas. 

We only add one more story from this 
Arabic collection of legends. Once upon a 
time in Bethlehem, it is said, the Divine 
Child with some others went into the shop 
of a dyer whose name was Salem. He was 
from home. They accordingly threw all the 
rags in the shop into a tub full of blue. 
When Salem returned he was much vexed, 
whereupon the Christ changed back each 
1 Chap. 23. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 



123 



rag to its proper colour. So great a hold 
did this story take on the popular imagi- 
nation that a dyer's shop, travellers say, is 
still in Persia called a Christ's shop. 

Now it is not needful to occupy space in 
pointing out the fantastic character of these 
as spurious additions to the life of our Lord 
recorded in the canonical Gospels. They 
show at least two things : (1) the intense and 
overmastering curiosity which possessed men 
in early times to know something of the 
details of the Lord's childhood beyond the 
simple account given by St. Luke, that " He 
increased in wisdom and stature, and in 
favour with God and man " ; and they show 
(2) exactly what kind of Gospel the men of 
the first six centuries would have been able 
to construct by their own unaided efforts. 
Does any one want to know in what consists 
the inspiration of the Gospels ? As good 
a practical answer as need be given is to bid 
such a one read the apocryphal gospels. 
The difference between the two is like the 
difference between light and darkness. It 



^LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



has been noticed as u an astonishing proof 
of the Divine guidance vouchsafed to the 
evangelists, that no man of their time or 
since has been able to touch the picture of the 
Christ without debasing it." And the diffi- 
culty in speaking of the contrast is to use 
language which shall not appear exaggerated 
to those who are not familiar with the 
documents ; no language, we will be bold 
to say, could appear too strong to any one 
who has dispassionately read them for him- 
self. For it must be remembered that here 
we have not selected by any means the 
most fanciful stories for quotation ; those 
only have been chosen which are suitable 
for our present purpose and which will bear 
quotation without exciting disgust. Many of 
the remainder are so irreverent and so foolish 
that the only effect of quotation would be to 
provoke a smile. 

Let us now turn to the second and 
distinct class of this apocryphal literature, 
which professes to give an account of our 
Lord's trial before Pilate and His descent 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 125 

to the underworld. The most notable book 
in this series is called the Gospel of Nico- 
demuSy or the Acts of Pilate. It was very 
popular in the Middle Ages, and upon it 
were based man)' of the details of the 
old mystery plays of the Passion. It was 
much read in England ; indeed, almost 
simultaneously with the introduction of print- 
ing into Britain, it was published in black 
letter in 1509 by Wynkyn de Worde. It 
inspired the romance of the enchanter Merlin. 
And even in Ireland it had a great circu- 
lation. Prof. Atkinson has lately printed 
a translation of it taken from the Passions 
and Homilies of the Speckled Book, which 
is one of the treasures of the Royal Irish 
Academy. To understand the popularity of 
this work we must remember that there was 
a very early belief that Pontius Pilate became 
a convert to Christianity. In the calendar of 
the Ethiopic Church, he is canonized as a 
saint along with his wife Procla ; and their 
festival is celebrated on June 25th. But, 
whether he was ever converted or not, it 



126 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



seems to be probable that some genuine 
report of Pilate to the Roman emperor, con- 
cerning the trial and crucifixion of our Lord, 
was extant in the second century, and that 
the book we now have is a debased and in- 
terpolated transcript of this. If such be the 
fact, there may be grains of true history 
enshrined in a good deal of later tradition. 
In any case, incidents such as the pleading 
of Nicodemus on behalf of our Lord, the 
charge of magic brought against the Christ, 
and the imprisonment of Joseph of Arima- 
thsea for his partisanship were widely be- 
lieved in the Middle Ages. The names of 
Dismas and Gestas for the two malefactors, 
of Procla for Pilate's wife, of Longinus for 
the soldier who pierced our Lord's side with 
a spear, of Veronica for the woman upon 
whose handkerchief the impression of the 
Lord's face was received (a story upon 
which Roman Catholics have enlarged), are 
all derived from this Gospel of Nicodemus. 
It is not of course suggested that these 
details are trustworthy ; but it is only fair 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 127 



to point out that the Gospel of Nicodemus 
is free from the follies which disfigure the 
Gospels of the Infancy. It is in the main 
an expansion for popular use of the narrative 
contained in the closing chapters of St. 
Matthew's Gospel. All the incidents are 
told at greater length and with dramatic 
additions. Thus, to quote from the recently 
published Irish version : " Then said Pilate : 
Well then, thou art a king ? Thou sayest 
so anyhow, said the Lord ; and what thou 
sayest is true, for I was born for that, and 
for that I came into the world ; and every 
one who is on the side of truth heareth me. 
Pilate rejoined : The law saith that there 
is no truth on earth. That is not so, said 
Jesus ; truth will exist on earth so long as 
I am in it." 1 Several incidents of this sort 
are conceived with more good taste than we 
should expect from our experience of the 
other writings of this class ; but we come 
back on the false and the fictitious when 
we turn to the Descent to the Underzvorld, 
1 Atkinson. Todd Lectures, R.I. A., p. 363. 



128 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



the last book it is necessary to mention. 
This is a manifest forgery, a pious fraud of 
the fifth century, written apparently to 
gratify the intruding curiosity of the vulgar 
as to the conditions of the world of spirit. 
It is also to be found in an Irish version 
in Prof. Atkinson's edition of the Passions 
and Homilies of the Speckled Book ; but 
our ancestors, in reading it, were occupying 
themselves, it is to be feared, with hope- 
lessly unhistorical legends. The pith of this 
is a story told by Joseph of Arimathaea, who 
mentions that among those who arose from 
their graves in Jerusalem at our Lord's 
crucifixion were two men called Karinus 
and Leucius. We may pass over without 
further comment the fact that Leucius 
Karinus was the name of the well-known 
author of several heretical apocrypha. But 
leaving that aside, it is said that these two 
persons, being restored to life, and being 
questioned as to their experiences in Hades, 
wrote down separately for the elders of the 
synagogue the same verbatim account of 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 129 

what they heard and saw in the other world 
after death. They describe at great length 
a dispute, which took place between Satan 
and the Lord of Hades, as to the signifi- 
cance of a great light which illuminated 
even that gloomy region after the Passion 
of the Saviour. While they are considering 
what may mean these golden rays, which 
are in truth announcing the coming deliver- 
ance, suddenly they hear a voice of thunder 
saying : " Lift up your heads, O ye gates, 
and be ye lift up, ye iron doors, that the 
King of glory may come in." Our Lord 
then enters in the form of a man. Satan 
is vanquished, and the saints are signed with 
the cross and led forthwith into Paradise. 
Karinus and Leucius are allowed only three 
days to remain upon earth in order to write 
their narratives, which are found miracu- 
lously to correspond. "Immediately," says 
the legend, "they were changed into exceed- 
ingly white forms, and were seen no more. 
But what they had written was found to agree 
perfectly, the one not containing a single 

9 



130 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

letter more or less than the other. And 
Pilate wrote down all these transactions and 
placed the accounts in the public records." 

When we have said that some of this is told 
dramatically and with reverence, we have said 
all that can charitably be urged for the stories 
of the Descent to the Underworld. People 
wanted to know exactly what was meant 
by the words in the creed, " Pie descended 
into hell"; and as materials for a true 
account were not at hand, nothing being 
recorded on the subject in Scripture, it is 
not surprising that the religious romance 
which was invented to supply the lack of 
revelation was not very edifying. It fur- 
nishes one more instance of the utter in- 
ability of the men of the early centuries to 
touch the narrative of the holy Gospels 
without spoiling it. The authors of this 
Descent to Hades were pious men, — of that 
there can be no doubt, — their piety is mani- 
fest on every page ; but not having clearly 
understood that a pious fraud is a contra- 
diction in terms, that nothing is so pious 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 131 

as the truth, their well-meant efforts to 
add to the revelation of the risen Lord 
only served to disfigure it. The vulgarity 
of the Gospels of the Infancy is absent ; but 
credulity and superstition have become very 
common by the time we reach this fifth 
century romance. 

Some will perhaps ask : Is there no pos- 
sibility of any genuine words of our blessed 
Lord being preserved in these legends ? 
For if there were even such a possibility, 
they would be worth reading for that 
reason alone. To this question it must be 
answered, that there is little hope of arriving 
thus at any genuine words of the Lord. 
Those which are attributed to Him in the 
Gospels of the Infancy have not the ring of 
genuineness which those have with which 
we are familiar. They are unworthy of the 
great Master, and we cannot believe them 
to have proceeded from His lips. We say 
nothing now, of course, of the possibility of 
such precious fragments being preserved in 
the patristic literature of the second and third 



132 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

centuries. One or two sayings have come 
down to us which might perhaps have been 
spoken by the Christ, such as " Shew your- 
selves tried bankers," meaning, " Put your 
talents to good use," preserved by Origen ; 
or, " In whatsoever I may find you, in this 
also will I judge you," preserved by Justin 
Martyr ; or again, "He who is near Me is 
near the fire": but there are certainly none 
such recorded in the apocryphal gospels, 
which are untrustworthy from first to last. 
Yet these wild legends have many uses other 
than those which they supply in an evi- 
dential point of view frrm their absolute 
contrast to the inspired writings of the 
evangelists. This is what we have especially 
endeavoured to draw out in this paper ; but 
they have many other lessons for the men 
and women of our generation. It is always 
instructive to look at any subject of interest 
to ourselves from a standpoint which is not 
our own ; and from the wide circulation and 
popularity of these documents in the Middle 
Ages we get a very fair idea of the tastes 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 133 

of mediaeval Christianity. The Christian 
public of the Middle Ages were very credu- 
lous and superstitious. Granted ; but they 
were possessed with an overwhelming cer- 
tainty of the majesty of the Person of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing was too great, 
nothing too marvellous to be attributed to 
Him. And so far they were unquestionably 
right. We have got beyond them (as the 
world has grown wiser) in our appreciation 
of evidence, in our respect for truth, in our 
quickened moral sensitiveness as to what is 
and what is not worthy of Almighty God ; 
and hence we are saved from the fetters 
of superstition which tied and bound many 
of them. All this is true : but yet, if, in 
freeing ourselves from superstition, we have 
grown incredulous of miracle as such ; if, in 
limiting the demands upon faith, we have 
exalted too much the province of reason ; 
if, in vindicating the claims of man's intellect, 
we have learnt to forget the essentially 
supernatural character of Christianity, — then 
we are in worse case than they. We hear 



134 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

a great deal of the dangers of superstition, 
and truly they are manifold ; but it is 
worth seriously considering whether there is 
really so serious a danger in this direction 
as in that other of absolute infidelity. As 
Bacon tells us, 1 " There is a superstition in 
avoiding superstition ; when men think to 
do best, if they go furthest from the super- 
stition commonly received : therefore, care 
should be had that (as it fareth in ill 
purgings), the good be not taken away with 
the bad ; which commonly is done, when 
the people is the reformer." It is a very 
easy thing for a writer to point out the 
extravagances of the apocryphal gospels, 
it is easy for the reader to acquiesce ; it is 
not so easy to insure that, while we see the 
mote in our brother's eye, we shall also see 
the beam in our own. There is a prevalent 
tendency to minimize as far as may be 
the supernatural element in Christianity, a 
tendency which is really most pernicious. 
For if Christianity is true, it is rooted and 
1 Essay xvii. Of Superstition. 



THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS. 135 

grounded in supernaturalism. And so let 
us not forget that the reason we reject the 
stories of the early forgers, of which an ac- 
count has been given, is that we can prove 
them to be forgeries ; we know all about 
their origin and growth. They are the 
myths of primitive Christianity, and in this 
stand in sharp contradistinction to its history. 
We do not reject them because of their 
miraculous character as such ; we reject them 
because the miracles are not morally bene- 
ficial, because they are purposeless, and be- 
cause they are badly attested. The romances 
which relate them are not authentic, they 
have no real connexion with the persons 
whose names they bear. But yet, though 
rejecting, and thankfully rejecting, the super- 
stitions of mediaevalism, it is not well to 
forget that it is from the faith of mediaeval 
Christianity that we inherit our own. We 
are far beyond the authors of the Arabic 
Gospel or the first readers of the Speckled 
Book in science and in sobriety of judgment ; 
but nevertheless we hold substantially the 



136 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

same faith — a faith which led them, in spite 
of its imperfection, to look beyond the 
surface of things to that kingdom where (say 
the old Irish homilists) there is life without 
death, youth without age, joy without sorrow, 
peace without strife, unity without division, 
and great gladness without end for evermore. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE MIRACULOUS IN EARLY CHRISTIAN 
LIT ERA TURE. 

By Rev. J. H. BERNARD, B.D. 



^7 



LECTURE IV. 



THE MIRACULOUS IN EARLY CHRISTIAN 



NE of the commonest objections urged 



at the present day against our belief 
in the miraculous character of Christianity 
appeals to a tendency in human nature which 
is very strong in most people ; namely, the 
tendency to hasty generalization. Thus, we 
are told that, if we accept as true the record 
of our Lord's miracles, and especially the 
miracle of His Resurrection, we should, in 
order to be consistent, pledge ourselves also 
to belief in numberless other alleged occur- 
rences which seem miraculous or out of the 
ordinary course of nature. On the other 
hand, if we reject the so called wonders of 
paganism and the miracles of the Church of 



LITERA TURE, 




i4o LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Rome, it is supposed that we have no better 
ground for believing in the supernatural 
origin of Christianity, and that therefore this 
also should be given up as impossible to be 
held by an enlightened rationalism. And in 
particular it has been urged that the Gospel 
miracles form only the beginning of a re- 
corded series of wonders which have lasted 
down to the present day ; that ecclesiastical 
history from the days of the apostles to our 
own teems with miracles, many of them well 
attested by apparently good witnesses ; and 
that, as our historical vision takes a wider 
range, we shall see the necessity of either 
rejecting all or accepting all alike. 

Now, it is not needful to spend time in 
showing the illogical character of this reason- 
ing. If there is one principle clearer than 
another as to evidence, it is this, that every 
case which comes under review must be 
judged on its own merits, no two sets of 
witnesses being exactly alike. It has been 
argued with some plausibility that in the 
miracles recorded throughout the whole Bible 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



we can trace a consistent plan in their dis- 
tribution and occurrence. Thus Archbishop 
Trench has noticed that the miracles of the 
Old Testament are chiefly grouped round 
two great epochs in the history of the theo- 
cratic kingdom — that of its foundation under 
Moses and Joshua, and that of its restoration 
by Elijah and Elisha ; and the miracles of 
the New Testament also ushered in a new 
era for the whole world. And it has been 
said that no such crisis having since occurred, 
there is no antecedent probability in favour 
of miracles having happened since. But this 
is mere speculation : we shall confine our- 
selves strictly to the evidence ; for what the 
objection rests upon is the plea that the 
evidence for mediaeval miracles is just as 
good as for those of the Bible. Now, if it 
could be shown that all the miracles of 
ecclesiastical history were of the same general 
type, of the same antecedent probability, and 
attested by as remarkable and tried evidence 
as the miracles of the Xew Testament, then 
the objection might be applicable ; but as 



142 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



this cannot be shown, it must not be assumed 
without a protest. 

It is here proposed to consider briefly the 
testimony to contemporary miracles which 
we find in early Christian literature, and I 
believe we shall see that the facts do not 
at all warrant the conclusion to which I 
have alluded as supposed to be binding on 
reasonable men. It is not plain that the 
miraculous of ecclesiastical history stands on 
the same level, whether in regard to quality 
or in regard to evidence, as the miraculous of 
the New Testament. 

But this having been said, a protest should 
be entered against the assumption, that be- 
cause a fact is not sufficiently attested, there- 
fore it cannot be true. There is another 
alternative besides true or false, namely " not 
proven " ; and this we shall have to bear in 
mind if we wish to avoid over-statement of our 
case. And so it is not here asserted, nor is it 
even implied, that miracles could not or even 
did not happen after apostolic times ; it will 
be time enough to draw our inferences when 



THE MIRACULOUS. 143 

the facts are before us. There have been 
many different opinions held regarding the 
cessation of the miraculous gifts entrusted to 
the apostolic Church. The Church of Rome 
believes that they are still in her possession. 
Many Protestants, on the other hand, believe 
that they died with the apostolic company. 
The chief reason alleged for this latter 
opinion is apparently based on the assump- 
tion that miracles are only given for evidential 
purposes, that their sole function is to certify 
the Divine character of revelation, and that 
when this has been sufficiently established, 
their work is done, and they may not be 
expected to continue. And, curiously enough, 
but most unreasonably, it has been assumed 
that the apostles could not have worked any 
miracle save those recorded in Scripture, or 
at least that no trustworthy record could be 
preserved of such. Between these extreme 
views are to be ranked the great body of old 
English divines, e.g., Dodwell and Tillotson, 
who held that miracles were occasional in the 
Christian Church until the time of Constan- 



144 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



tine, at the beginning of the fourth century, 
when, Christianity being established by the 
civil power, it no longer needed such super- 
natural assistance. Thus Fuller explains that 
" miracles are the swaddling clothes of the 
infant Churches." And yet another view has 
commended itself to many, as most in accord- 
ance with the evidence we possess ; namely 
that, as Bishop Kaye 1 puts it, " the power of 
working miracles extended to, but not beyond, 
the disciples upon whom the apostles con- 
ferred it by imposition of their hands." Let 
us first see what Scripture tells us. We have 
recorded in Mark xvi. 17 a remarkable 
promise given by our Lord to His apostles : 
" These signs shall follow them that believe : 
In My name shall they cast out devils ; they 
shall speak with new tongues ; they shall 
take up serpents; and if they drink any 
deadly thing, it shall not hurt them ; they 
shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall 
recover." And if we turn to the Acts of the 
Apostles we shall find instances of all these 
1 Tertiillian, p. 49. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



145 



powers (with the exception of immunity from 
poison) being enjoyed, not only by the 
original eleven and by St. Paul, but by many 
other disciples, (i.) Thus the gift of tongues 
found its fulfilment at Pentecost, and is alluded 
to by St. Paul in his epistles. Prophecy, 
which was akin to this, is frequently spoken 
of as a " sign " of an apostle. Agabus (Acts 
xi. 28} not only predicted a famine, but also 
warned St. Paul of what would happen to him 
at Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 10). Twelve un- 
named Ephesian disciples on whom St. Paul 
laid his hands were endued with this gift 
(Acts xix. 6), as were also the four daughters 
of St. Philip the Evangelist (Acts xxi. 9). 
(ii.) Again the story of St. Paul and the 
viper at Malta (Acts xxviii. 3) furnishes an 
exemplification of the words " they shall take 
up serpents." (iii.) The mysterious power of 
exorcism, or the casting out of devils, was 
exercised by St. Paul in the case of the young 
woman at Philippi " who brought her masters 
much gain by soothsaying " (Acts xvi. 16). 
(iv.) And the gift of healing was used by St. 

10 



146 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Paul for the relief of Publius at Malta (Acts 
xxviii. 8), by St. Peter for the cure of the 
palsied /Eneas at Lydda (Acts ix. 33), and is 
even said to have displayed itself through the 
medium of St. Peter's shadow (Acts v. 15) 
and St. Paul's clothing (Acts xix. 12), "inso- 
much that unto the sick were carried away 
from his body handkerchiefs or aprons, and 
the diseases departed from them, and the evil 
spirits went out." The restoration of Euty- 
chus (Acts xx. 9) and of Dorcas (Acts ix. 36) 
will be in our remembrance. And the general 
expression, "signs and wonders" is used of 
the doings of St. Paul and St. Barnabas at 
Iconium (Acts xiv. 3), of St. Stephen at Jeru- 
salem (Acts vi. 8), and of St. Philip the 
Evangelist at Samaria (Acts viii. 6). 

We see, therefore, that these Divine gifts, 
promised by our Lord to His Church, were at 
least occasionally exercised by individuals a 
quarter of a century after His Ascension, and 
that they were not confined to the apostolic 
company, but shared in by numerous persons. 
Hence I think we should not be surprised if 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



147 



we found in the early literature of the second 
century records of many miracles such as the 
above. Many persons must have been living 
in the time of Clement and Polycarp who 
had themselves received a measure of mira- 
culous power at the hands of the apostles. 
And yet we find in the literature of the 
earliest sub-apostolic age few and scanty 
references of this character. Our records of 
this period are fragmentary and imperfect, it 
is true ; but yet it is remarkable that they 
tell us so little on the subject. With a few 
notable exceptions, of which something shall 
be said farther on, there is no trace up to the 
end of the second century of any miraculous 
gift still existing in the primitive Church, 
save those of prophecy and healing, includ- 
ing exorcism, both of which are frequently 
mentioned. 

And first as to prophecy. In the Shepherd 
of Hennas (Command xi.) rules are laid 
down for the discernment of false prophets ; 
thus quite early in the second century is 
implied the continued presence of the pro- 



148 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



phetic power. Similarly, in the manual 
known as the Didache or " Teaching of the 
Twelve Apostles," the abuse of the " grace 
of prophecy " is seriously reckoned with. A 
little later Justin Martyr (Dial. 308 B.) says, 
" With us even up to the present time are 
continued the prophetic gifts of the Spirit." 1 
Upon these notices two remarks may be 
offered. In the first place it is obvious 
that of all Divine gifts " prophecy " of this 
sort is that which would most easily lend 
itself to imposture ; and we observe that the 
earliest notice of the power implies also the 
presence of its counterfeit. And further 
Justin is apparently surprised that the gift 
should have lasted to his day, for he says, 
" even up to the present " ; from which we 
may gather, as it seems, that instances of 
genuine prophecy in his day and in his 
neighbourhood were not very numerous. 

The gift of healing is also spoken of 
as present in the Church of the second 

1 Tvapa yap rjplv kg\ /xe^pi vvv npo(pr]TiKo. xapLO-p-ard 
zo-TLv. Ci. Dial. 315 B. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 149 

century. It is* specified by Justin Martyr, 1 
though he does not give any particular 
instance in which it had proved beneficial 
within his knowledge, an omission which 
considerably detracts from the value of his 
testimony. Origen 2 also asserts that " many 
give proofs to those who have been healed 
through their power that they have attained 
a miraculous power through this faith ; while 
over those who require healing they invoke 
no other power than the Almighty God and 
Jesus Christ, together with the preaching of 
His Gospel. Therefore have I seen many 
persons rescued from severe circumstances 
of delirium and fancy, and many other evils 
which no man and none of your demons 
could cure." 

But the commonest exemplification of this 
gift was displayed in the driving out of 
devils ; exorcism is regarded quite as a thing 
of course by the second century Fathers. 
Justin Martyr builds up an argument upon 

1 Dial. 258 A. 

2 Contra Celsum, iii. 24. 



150 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



it. 1 " That Jesus was made man for the 
sake of the believers and for the subversion 
of demons is manifest from what is done 
before your eyes all over the world ; when 
those who are vexed by demons whom your 
own enchanters could not cure, are healed 
by our Christians abjuring and casting out 
the demons in the name of Jesus." And 
the fervid and passionate Tertullian gives 
this bold challenge to his heathen oppo- 
nents: 3 "Bring before your tribunals a man 
possessed with a demon ; the evil spirit, if 
commanded by a Christian, will speak and 
confess himself a demon." These passages, 
strong as they are, are however not con- 
vincing that any miracle was here worked. 
We may notice the extravagance of the 
claim made by Origen and Tertullian : that 
power which in the days of the apostles 

1 Apol. 45, A. Cf. also Dial. 247 C, 302 A, 311 B, 
350 B, 361 C. 

2 Apol. 23. Cf. also Apol. 37, 43 ; De Spectac. 29 ; 
De Test. An. 3 ; Ad Scap. 2 ; De Corona, 11 ; De 
Idolol. 1 1 ; in which passages allusion is made to the 
expulsion of demons as a common occurrence. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 151 

was confined to them and those on whom 
they had laid their hands — which again was 
only within their power on special occasions 
when they were moved by a special Divine 
impulse — is here alleged to be the common 
property of all Christian people, and to be 
susceptible of exercise at any moment and 
on any occasion. Again, we must remember 
that phenomena of this sort are often quite 
explicable without any recourse to super- 
natural agency ; the power of a strong will 
over a weak one would sufficiently account 
for everything described by Tertullian. , But 
all the Fathers of this period believed in the 
reality of magic, and so, perhaps, saw the 
miraculous in very ordinary events. We 
must not be too ready to despise them for 
this. It is not so long since the inhabitants 
of these islands believed in witchcraft, and 
attempted to put down witches by attaching 
the extreme penalty of the law to their sup- 
posed crimes. Witches were believed in by 
so intelligent a man and sagacious a judge as 
Sir Matthew Hale, by so able a physician as 



152 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Sir Thomas Browne, the author of Religio 
Medici} And in later times John Wesley 
said, 2 " The giving up of witchcraft is 
the giving up the Bible," and confidently 
affirmed that " the course which he and his 
coadjutors had taken was approved by 
miracles " of healing. 3 But there is another 
circumstance about this second century belief 
in magic to which your attention should be 
called. The people who held it most strongly 
yet admitted a broad interval between the won- 
ders of the thaumaturgists, whether pagan 
or Christian, and the genuine miraculous. 
So, too, you remember, the Jews of our 
Lord's time practised thaumaturgy of a kind ; 
but yet they plainly thought there was some 
tremendous difference between their own 
feats and His wonderful works ; else why did 
they refuse to give credence to these latter ? * 

1 See Goodwin, Foundations of Creed, p. 372. 

2 See Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 40. 

3 See Southey's Life of Wesley, vol. i., p. 277 ; vol. 
ii. 3 pp. 153, 199. 

4 Cf. Mozley, Bampton.Lectwes, pp. 164, 297. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 153 

Thus, when the heathen critics of early times 
were confronted with the assertion of our 
Lord's Resurrection, they answered at once 
that it was impossible that a dead man 
should come to life again, although they had 
their own magical arts going on. To take 
a specific example, Pliny the Elder was 
a believer in natural magic ; but he said 
distinctly that to raise a person from the 
dead was beyond the power of the gods to 
accomplish. 1 And in like manner Origen 
remarks of the pagans, " The mystery of the 
Resurrection is spoken of by the unbelieving 
with ridicule." 2 Now many of the Fathers 
draw just such a distinction between the 
" miracles " of their own and of the apostolic 
age, placing the latter on a pinnacle by them- 
selves. For example, when we go on to the 
fourth century, we find Chrysostom saying 
that "all the men of his time together" 3 
could not do as much as St. Paul's handker- 

1 Nat. Hist. ii. 5, 7. 

2 Contra Celsi/m, 1, 7. 

3 ol 8e vvv navres ofiov. De Sacerdot. iv. 3, fia. 



154 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



chiefs ; and he implies that in his day there 
were no raisings from the dead. 1 And Augus- 
tine explains that miracles, being especially 
signal events, and meant to awaken men 
from the torpor of custom, are not to be 
expected in every age 2 — a sensible remark, 
which, however, did not keep him, as we 
shall see, from over-credulity. It is then 
plain, that the admitted difference in kind 
between the miracles of Christ and the 
alleged miracles of subsequent centuries 
makes us feel somewhat dubious as to 
whether these latter were genuine miracles 
at all. 3 Further, as early as Tertullian, we 

1 Cf. also Horn, in i Cor. vi. 2, 3 : " Argue not, 
because miracles do not happen now, that they did 
not happen then. ... In those times they were 
profitable, and now they are not." 

2 De Lazar. iv. 3 : "If God saw that the raising of 
the dead would profit the living, He would not have 
omitted it." (Quoted by Newman, On Miracles, p. 
140.) 

3 De Util. Credendi, 16 : " Cur (inquis) ista modo 
non hunt ? Quia non moverent nisi mira essent ; et 
si solita essentia mira non essent." Cf. also De Civ. 
Dei, xxii. 8, 1 : " Nam etiam nunc fiunt miracula in 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



155 



get a distinct intimation that the miraculous 
powers which had been exerted by the 
apostles no longer existed 1 — for after saying 
that the apostles had spiritual powers 
peculiar to themselves Tertullian adds : " For 
they raised the dead, which God alone can 
do ; and they healed the sick, which none 
but Christ did." If such occurrences were 
even occasional in his day, this language 
would be strange. Of the gradual cessation 
of the miraculous, Origen thus speaks : " Mi- 
racles began with the preaching of Jesus, 
were multiplied after His ascension, and then 
again decreased ; but even now some traces 
of them remain with a few, whose souls are 

ejus nomine, sive per sacramenta ejus, sive per 
orationes vel memorias sanctorum ejus ; sed non 
eadem claritate illustrantur, ut tanta quanta ilia 
gloria diffamentur " ; and "Cur, inquiunt, nunc ilia 
miracula, quae prasdicatis facta esse, non fiunt? Pos- 
sem quidem dicere, necessaria fuisse, priusquam 
crederet mundus, ad hoc ut crederet mundus" (id.). 

1 De Pud. c. 21. "Nam et [sc. apostoli] mortuos 
suscitaverunt quod Deus solus ; et debiles redinte 
graverunt, quod nemo nisi Christus." 



156 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

cleansed by the word." 1 We find then (i.) 
that by the end of the second century and 
beginning of the third century there is a 
growing suspicion that miracles are dying 
out. (ii.) We find that such miracles as are 
recorded as late as this are generally 
regarded as different in kind from those of 
the apostolic age ; and (iii.) in the earliest 
age of post-apostolic Christianity, the " mi- 
racles " we read of are almost without excep- 
tion those of prophecy, healing, and exorcism. 
But exceptions there are, so interesting that 
they require separate treatment. 

Eusebius the historian 2 has preserved for 
us fragments of the writings of one Papias, 
who was bishop of Hierapolis in the second 
century, an associate of Polycarp, and pro- 
bably a disciple of St. John ; and among 
other particulars he notes " certain wonderful 
accounts " that they contain. " For," says 
Eusebius, " that the Apostle Philip abode 
at Hierapolis with his daughters, has been 



1 Coiiti^a Celsiun, i. 2. 



2 H. E. iii. 39, 9. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 157 

stated above ; but we must now show how 
Papias, coming to them, received a marvel- 
lous account from the daughters of Philip : 
for he relates that in his time a resurrection 
of a dead person took place. Another 
wonderful event happened respecting Justus, 
surnamed Barsabas, who, though he drank a 
deadly poison, received no hurt through the 
grace of the Lord. This Justus is the one 
who was elected into the place of Judas the 
traitor by the holy apostles after the Ascen- 
sion of the Saviour, as is recorded in the book 
of the Acts." It was remarked a few pages 
back, that we find in the Acts no instance of 
the fulfilment of the Lord's promise to His 
apostles, "if they drink any deadly thing, it 
shall not hurt them," though we have abun- 
dant illustration of the outpouring of the 
other gifts enumerated in Mark xvi. 17. So 
it is interesting to find a tradition put in 
writing by one who was a disciple of St. John 
and a prominent person in the earliest sub- 
apostolic age, that Justus Barsabas escaped 
the fatal effects of poison " through the grace 



158 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

of the Lord." No doubt the story may not 
be true ; Papias may have been deceived in 
the matter — he only professes to have got the 
account from hearsay ; but yet there is no- 
thing inherently unlikely in what he states to 
any one who believes in the supernatural origin 
of Christianity. But the first part of the ex- 
tract from Papias is even more remarkable : 
" that in his time a resurrection of a dead 
person took place." As has been already 
noted, Papias does not give this on his own 
authority; it was told to him by the daughters 
of St. Philip the Evangelist, who had settled 
at Hierapolis, of which place Papias was 
bishop. Of these persons we read in Acts 
viii. and xxi., St. Philip being accredited by 
" signs and wonders," and his daughters being 
described as endowed with the gift of pro- 
phecy. And it is quite possible that they 
may have been eyewitnesses of some such 
event as the raising of Dorcas by St. Peter, 
which Papias, having heard of it from eye- 
witnesses, might perhaps describe as having 
happened in his day. But it is hardly worth 



THE MIRACULOUS. 159 

while to go into possibilities of this sort ; a 
more interesting thing is to notice, that Papias 
virtually implies that he himself never saw 
any such occurrence, his only knowledge of 
"miracle" of this kind being derived from 
hearsay ; he does not even mention the name 
of the person who was thus raised from the 
dead. So that, instead of concluding from this 
notice, even supposing that it enshrines a true 
tradition, that miracles were frequent in the 
time of Papias, an exactly opposite inference 
is to be drawn. If they were frequent, if he 
had ever seen one himself, he would have tola 
us of it ; or, to speak more accurately, Euse- 
bius would not have selected for quotation a 
second-hand story, if the direct evidence of 
an eyewitness were on record. 

We now proceed to quote the most striking 
account of " miracles " to be found in the 
Christian literature of the second century. 
Irenaeus, a disciple of Polycarp, was bishop of 
Lyons at the end of that century. He wrote 
a controversial treatise against the heretics of 
his day, which has come down to us. In the 



160 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

course of his argument, when speaking of the 
followers of one Simon, a heretic, and their 
inability to work miracles, he proceeds : 1 
" They can neither give sight to the blind, 
nor hearing to the deaf, nor put to flight all 
demons, except those which are sent into 
others by themselves, if they can indeed even 
do this. Nor can they cure the weak, or the 
lame, or the paralytic, or those who are 
troubled in any other part of the body, as 
often happens to be done in respect of bodily 
infirmity. Nor can they furnish effective 
remedies for those external accidents which 
may occur. And so far are they from raising 
the dead, as the Lord raised them, and the 
apostles did by means of prayer, and as 
when frequently in the brotherhood the whole 
Church in the locality, having made petition 
with much fasting and prayer, the spirit of 
the dead one has returned, and the man has 
been given back to the prayers of the saints 
— (so far are they from doing this) that they 
do not believe that it can possibly be done, 
1 Adv. Hear. II. xxxi. § 2. 



THE MIRACULOUS. i6r 

and they think that resurrection from the 
dead merely means a recognition of the truth 
of their tenets." . . . But on the other hand, 
as Irenaeus insists in the next chapter, " those 
who are in truth (the Lord's) disciples, having 
received grace from Him, do in His name 
perform (miracles) for the benefit of other 
men, according to the gift which each one 
has received from Him. For some certainly 
and truly drive out demons, so that those 
who have been cleansed from the evil spirits 
frequently believe and are in the Church. 
Others have foreknowledge of things to come, 
and visions, and prophetic sayings. Others 
heal the sick by imposition of their hands, 
and they are restored to health. Yea, more- 
over, as we said, even the dead were raised, 
and abode with us many years. 1 What 
more shall I say ? It is not possible to tell 
the number of the gifts which the Church 
throughout all the world has received from 
God in the name of Jesus Christ, who was 
crucified under Pontius Pilate, and which she 

1 Tjyepdrjtrav Kai Trapipeivav avv rjp,7u Uavols ereon. 

I I 



162 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



exerts day by day for the welfare of the 
nations, neither deceiving any nor taking 
any reward for such. For as freely as she 
hath received from God, so freely doth she 
minister." 1 

The date of this treatise is about 185 A.D., 
and it is to be observed that the miracles put 
prominently forward by Irenseus in his argu- 
ment, as affording a criterion of the truth of 
the doctrine of the Church, are, as usual, pro- 
phecy healing, and exorcism. These he speaks 
of much in the way in which we have seen 
that Justin Martyr and Tertullian do ; and it 
is not necessary to add anything to what has 
been said about their evidence, further than 
this : Irenseus is here writing in the heat of 
controversy ; his language is passionate and 
rhetorical, and he deals altogether in general 
statements ; he has not produced a single 
specific instance. There is a want of par- 
ticularity and detail about what he says, 
which seriously detracts from the value of 
his testimony. Nevertheless, however, many 
1 Cf. also Adv. Hccr. V. vi. § 1, for a similar claim. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 163 

writers, e.g.> the cautious and learned Hooker, 1 
have supposed that there were still in the 
time of Irenaeus traces of that supernatural 
power which was manifested in the apostolic 
and sub-apostolic Church, and that we have 
here a reference which, though perhaps ex- 
aggerated, yet embodies historic facts. But 
it will be asked, Is this meant to apply to 
what Irenaeus says about the raising of dead 
persons, as well as to his remarks about the 
prevalence of prophecy and the power of ex- 
orcism ? Well, Hooker accepted the whole 
statement as true without question and with- 
out qualification, and so have others since his 
time. But it may be argued with consider- 
able justice, that what Irenaeus tells us about 
gifts of healing, etc., seems to stand on a 
quite different level from what he says about 
the bringing of the dead to life. For in the 
passages cited above there is a sudden and 
unexpected change of tense when he begins 
to speak of this greatest of miracles. 
Healing, exorcism, and prophecy — these, he 
1 E. P. v. lxvi. 3. 



^LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



asserts, are matters of present experience, 
but he never says that about resurrections 
from the dead. " It often happened," i.e. in 
the past ; "they were raised up," ie. again at 
some time now gone by. The use of the past 
tense here and here alone implies, we may say, 
that Irenseus had not witnessed an example 
with his own eyes, or, at least, that such occur- 
rences were not usual when he was writing. 
And so when he states, " Even the dead 
were raised and abode with us many years," 
it does not appear that he means anything 
more than this — that such events happened 
within living memory. Now Irenaeus was a 
disciple of Polycarp, and Polycarp was a dis- 
ciple of St. John ; so that if we view his 
statement thus, it will not appear so extra- 
ordinary. But the inference from the whole 
passage is, we believe, that these major 
miracles no longer happened — an inference 
which is corroborated by all the testimony 
we have got. For example, we read else- 
where that a Greek of high birth, by name 
Autolycus, promised Theophilus, who was 



THE MIRACULOUS. 165 

bishop of Antioch about the time of Irenaeus 
that if he could be gratified with the sight of 
a single person who had been actually raised 
from the dead, he would immediately believe 
in a resurrection after death. But the chal- 
lenge was declined, Theophilus remarking 
that there would be no moral value in a 
faith thus persuaded, as there is nothing 
meritorious in believing what we actually 
see. However, the good bishop does not 
state that he knows of a single specific in- 
stance ; and it is hardly likely that, if he 
had known of any such, he would not have 
produced it for the purpose of convincing his 
noble opponent. 1 

But if the " gifts " of the Church seem 
to have grown scarcer and scarcer as the 
second century went on, it is also to be 
noticed that miracles of the most astounding 
character abound in the records of ecclesi- 

1 It has been often remarked that this want of detail 
is a general characteristic of the testimony of the 
period. See Newman, Essay on Miracles, p. 130, and 
Mozley, Bamfiton Lectures, p. 295. 



1 66 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



astical history from the times of the Council 
of Nice onward. And it may be fairly 
enough demanded of us to give some reason 
why we do not accept the latter as true. It 
would be impossible to deal completely with 
so large a subject in the short space which 
remains, but we shall mention a few con- 
siderations as to the character of many 
alleged miracles, and as to the quality of 
the evidence by which they are attested, 
which give us reasonable grounds for deny- 
ing that they are at all comparable to those 
of the apostolic age. It must ever be re- 
membered that there are miracles — and 
miracles. 

(i) There are a great number of recorded 
events, seemingly miraculous, which on exa- 
mination can be resolved into false percep- 
tions, or deceptions of sense ; these are for 
the most part cases of visions or voices. 1 
To take a modern instance, the vision of 
Colonel Gardiner has been often spoken of 
as miraculous. Now we here cite Dr. Dod- 
1 See Paley's Evidences. Part II., chap. i. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 167 

dridge's account of it, 1 that the reader may 
judge for himself. Colonel Gardiner, who 
was a man of profligate life, was whiling away 
an hour one evening reading when suddenly 
" he saw an unusual blaze of light fall on 
the book, . . . which he at first imagined 
might happen by some accident in the candle. 
But lifting up his eyes, he apprehended, to 
his extreme amazement, that there was 
before him, as it were suspended in the air, 
a visible representation of our Lord upon 
the cross, surrounded on all sides with a 
glory ; and was impressed as if a voice, or 
something equivalent to a voice, had come 
to him to this effect, for he was not confident 
as to the very words, ' O sinner, did I suffer 
this for thee ? and are these the returns ? ' 
But whether this were an audible voice, or 
only a strong impression on his mind equally 
striking, he did not seem very confident ; 
though, to the best of my remembrance, he 
rather judged it to be the former." This 
will serve well as a type of a very large 

1 Works, vol. i., p. 248. 



i68 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



number of so called ecclesiastical miracles 
(such as the vision of the cross in the 
heavens which Constantine saw) ; they are 
almost all given on the authority of a solitary 
witness, depending on the evidence of one 
sense. They are only momentary visions ; 
the sensible proof of their reality is gone 
once the vision is over. And besides the 
risk of delusion which attaches to these, there 
is the risk also of imposture. The account 
cannot be examined at the moment, and in 
a time of hurry and confusion it may not 
be difficult for men of influence to gain 
credit for any story which they may wish 
to have believed. 

(2) Again, it often happens that in the 
accounts of many alleged miracles there is 
nothing in the story which infallibly proves 
the presence of supernatural agency. For 
example, we have an ancient record of the 
martyrdom of Polycarp, which took place 
about 155 A.D. In this we read as follows : 
"The fire making the appearance of a vault, 
like the sail of a vessel filled by the wind, 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



made a wall round about the body of the 
martyr ; and it was then in the midst not 
like flesh burning, but like gold and silver 
refined in a furnace. For we perceived such 
a fragrant smell as if it were the wafted 
odour of frankincense or some other precious 
stone. Whereupon one of the executioners 
to hasten his death stabbed him with a 
sword, and his blood from the wound put 
out the fire." Now similar phenomena have 
been recorded as happening on other oc- 
casions, e.g. at the martyrdoms of Savona- 
rola and Hooper ; 1 and it is obvious that 
they can be readily enough explained as the 
operations of natural forces, a little exag- 
gerated perhaps by pious enthusiasm. Very 
many so called miracles of all ages are of 
this low level ; they do not properly rise 
into the region of the supernatural at all 
Another famous second century illustration is 
found in the story of the Thundering Legion, 
which Eusebius thus describes : 2 "It is said 

1 See Lightfoot. Apostolic Fathei's, II. i. 599. 

2 Eus., H. E. v. 5 ; cf. v. 1. § 35. 



i ;c LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



that when Marcus Aurelius Caesar was form- 
ing his troops in order of battle against the 
Germans and Sarmatians, he was reduced to 
extremities by a failure of water. Meanwhile 
the soldiers in the so called Melitene legion, 
which for its faith remains to this day, knelt 
down upon the ground, as we are accustomed 
to do in prayer, and betook themselves to 
supplication. And whereas this sight was 
strange to the enemy, another still more 
strange happened immediately — thunder- 
bolts which caused the enemy's flight and 
overthrow ; and upon the army to which the 
men were attached who had called upon 
God, a rain which restored it entirely when 
it was all but perishing by thirst." Now 
that during the German war the Roman 
army suffered severely from want of water, 
and was relieved from a situation of great 
peril by a seasonable shower of rain, which 
had previously been prayed for by the 
Christians in the army, may be quite 
true. It is a story for which there is 
heathen as well as Christian authority ; but 



THE MIRACULOUS. 171 

it need not have been a miracle — in any 
other sense than that in which every answer 
to prayer is a miracle. We may take a 
third instance illustrating this tendency to 
observe miracle where really there was none 
— a tendency due to an intense belief in the 
overruling providence of God, coupled with 
grave ignorance as to the laws of nature 
and the operations of natural forces. In the 
account which Eusebius gives of the martyrs 
of Palestine during the Diocletian persecu- 
tion, he notes that horrible barbarities were 
practised at Caesarea, and thereupon he 
makes the following innocent comment. 1 
These atrocities having gone on for many 
days "a strange thing happened. The air 
happened to be clear and bright, and the 
aspect of the sky most serene. Then sud- 
denly from the greater part of the columns 
that supported the public porticoes issued 
drops like tears, and the market places and 
streets, though there was no moisture in the 
air, I know not whence it came, were sprinkled 
1 Be Mart. Pal. ix. 12. 



172 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



with water, and became wet ; so that it was 
immediately spread abroad among ail, that 
in an unaccountable manner the earth wept, 
not being able to endure the extreme impiety 
of these deeds ; and to address a reproof 
to men of a relentless and callous nature 
the very stones and senseless matter could 
bewail these facts. I well know that this 
account may appear, perhaps, an idle tale 
and fable to posterity, but it was not so to 
those who had its truth confirmed by their 
presence at the time." Here, again, a per- 
fectly natural occurrence — apparently some 
unusual sweating of the colonnades — is ex- 
aggerated by the pious historian into a 
testimony to the wrath of God because of 
the evils inflicted on His Church. 

Having said thus much as to the character 
of many of the alleged miracles of ecclesi- 
astical history, it remains to say a few words 
— and they must be very few — as to the 
evidence by which they are substantiated. 
And (i) it is remarkable that we have in no 
case outside the New Testament got the 



THE MIRACULOUS. 173 

testimony of the person who is supposed to 
have worked the miracles. There is no 
instance whatever in which a writer claims 
himself to have possession of supernatural 
power — a very significant circumstance when 
we recall the marked manner in which St. 
Paul, eg., states that the gift of miracles 
belonged to him. It may be remarked, in 
passing, that this not only marks off the 
miraculous of the New Testament from the 
miracles of the mediaeval Church, but it also 
distinguishes the supernatural in Christianity 
from the supernatural element in the other 
great religions of the world. For neither 
Mohammed nor Buddha ever pretended to 
work wonders ; Mohammed, in the Koran, 
says distinctly that he is a man like other 
men ; and the strange and meaningless 
mysteries with which Mohammedanism 
abounds were, we know, fastened upon the 
founder by later legends. 1 And in like man- 
ner the Buddhist legends teem with miserable 

1 Cf. for many references Paley, Evidences, Part 
H. §3- 



174 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

miracles attributed to Buddha and his dis- 
ciples, while Buddha himself prohibited the 
working of wonders. We need not dwell 
on the contrast here presented by Chris- 
tianity ; for " the fact that Christ professed 
to work miracles [in His own Person] is 
established by evidence as ample as any 
historical fact whatever." 1 And so when we 
read of the extraordinary miracles attributed 
to Gregory Thaumaturgus, we cannot fail 
to be struck by the fact that they are not 
mentioned in any writing of the saint him- 
self — they are found in a biography written 
a century after his death. Thus, too, the 
life of Antony by Athanasius abounds in 
miracle ; but here again the evidence is not 
that of the principal person concerned, nor 
is it even evidence contemporaneous with 
the events. (2) In the next place, these 
miracles attributed to saints may — in many 
cases — be accounted for by the misguided 
piety of their biographers. All too soon 



Ec:e Homo, p. 40. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 175 

in the Church's history 1 a false criterion of 
sanctity grew up ; it was supposed that the 
measure of a man's goodness was the amount 
of miraculous power by which his preaching 
was aided. Now from the belief that the 
man who works miracles must be a good 
man, the transition is easy to the converse 
inference. This man was a good man, as I 
know from my experience, therefore he must 
have worked miracles, and so it can be no 
harm to write down a few in his biography. 
He must have worked, if not these very 
wonders, at least others very like them. 2 We 
find thus that the farther removed in time 
the saint is from his biographer, the more 
is his life embellished with legend and 
glorified with miracle. The mediaeval record 
therefore comes before us "a maimed and 
discredited authority"; we reject much of 
its contents on the above grounds, and so 
we look with hesitation on the rest. No cri- 

1 Cf. Mozley, Bampton Lectures, p. 181. 

2 Newman lays down a principle very like this. 
See University Sermon on Development, p. 345. 



176 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



ticism of this sort can be applied to the 
miracles of the New Testament, for here we 
have contemporary testimony of the prin- 
cipal persons concerned ; and the miraculous 
is as prominent in the earlier as in the later 
canonical writings. (3) Thirdly, it inspires us 
with considerable doubt when we read how 
very opportunely many of these mediaeval 
miracles happened — opportunely, that is, not 
so much for the welfare of Christianity as 
for the triumph of a particular party or the 
glorification of a particular individual. In 
one sense, indeed, it is very far from suspicious 
to read that a miracle came at the right 
moment, i.e. for the support of God's truth ; 
but in another sense it is suspicious. If 
men are anxiously expecting a sign from 
heaven to guarantee the piety of a doubtful 
undertaking or the success of a hazardous 
cause, it is very likely that they will see the 
finger of God in what is really only the 
operation of His ordinary laws, and it is not 
improbable that they may be the dupes of 
unscrupulous persons who play upon their 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



177 



prejudices. E.g., Ambrose tells a wonder- 
ful story, which is corroborated by Augus- 
tine, of miracles of healing wrought by the 
relics of martyrs found under the high altar 
of a church at Milan. 1 By the touch of 
these sacred relics (which Ambrose says 
he saw discovered with his own eyes) the 
sick were relieved from their various diseases 
— nay, even a blind man received his sight. 
It may well be believed that this was told 
in perfect good faith, but it does not follow 
that the miraculous part of it is true. There 
seems to be no doubt whatever that genuine 

1 Cf. Conf. ix. 16, Serm. 2S6, De Civ. Dei, xxii. 8; 
and Ambr., Ep. 22. " Invenimus," says Ambrose, 
" miras magnitudinis viros duos, ut prisca aetas fere- 
bat. Ossa omnia integra, sanguinis plurimum. . . . 
Cognovistis, immo vidistis ipsi multos a daemoniis pur- 
gatos : plurimos etiam, ubi vestem sanctorum mani- 
bus contigerunt, iis quibus laborabant, debilitatibus 
absolutos : reparata vetusti temporis miracula, quo se 
per adventum Domini Jesu gratia terris major infu- 
derat, umbra quadam sanctorum corporum plerosque 
anatos cernitis. Quanta oraria jactitantur ! Quanta 
indumenta super reliquas sacratissimas et tactu ipso 
medicabilia reposcuntur ! Gaudent omnes extrema 
linea contingere, et qui contigerit, salvus erit." 

12 



178 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



relics of martyrs were discovered ; it has 
been shown recently that they are still pre- 
served at Milan. 1 Now the natural enthusiasm 
resulting from such a discovery would incline 
men at that time to expect as a matter of 
course miraculous cures. They were im- 
mediately regarded as a party triumph. No 
one is likely to accuse Ambrose or Augustine 
of deliberate deceit, but it is far from un- 
likely that they should have been themselves 
deceived. Augustine, in especial, always had 
a hankering after miracle ; he seems to have 
been a regular collector of marvellous tales, 
which he has recorded, on several occasions 
innocently adding that few know of these 
miracles to which he alludes, and that those 
who do know are not impressed by them. 
He had 2 " that fervid sensitiveness towards 
whatever seems to connect humanity with 
a spiritual system which has been the char- 

1 On the whole subject of the relics at Milan, see 
Newman's Hist. Sketches, ii., p. 364, § 99, and a letter at 
the end of the volume from Father Ambrose St. John. 

2 Isaac Taylor, Ancie?it Christianity. 



THE MIRACULOUS. 



'79 



acteristic of many powerful minds"; on this 
ground we might name, in company with 
him, such men as Martin Luther and John 
Wesley. It is quite curious how Augustine 
has himself thrown doubt on his records of 
the miraculous by his comments. " The 
modern miracles," he says, " barely become 
known even to the population of the city or 
town in which they take place ; and when 
recounted at a distance from the spot, they 
scarcely carry weight enough to get them 
believed without difficulty and hesitation, 
even when reported by Christian people to 
Christian people!' This failure to produce con- 
temporary conviction gives us reason for sup- 
posing that the attestation was not so strong 
as the good bishop of Hippo supposed. 

It would be quite beyond the limits 
of this lecture to enter more fully into 
the inadequacy of the mediaeval testimony 
to miracle as compared with the apostolic. 
Thus much has been said, because it is 
often so confidently asserted that the one 
is as good, or nearly as good, as the other ; 



180 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



and also because it may be well to hint, 
however briefly, at the way in which such 
assertions should be met. They are often 
answered by arguments which, if valid, would 
destroy all belief in the miracles of the 
Gospel ; thus people sometimes try to over- 
throw the accounts of mediaeval miracles by 
saying that they are contrary to the order 
of nature, and therefore impossible > and so 
there is no use in seriously reckoning with 
the testimony to them. But that argument, 
if valid, would destroy Christianity altogether; 
for if miracles be not possible, it is false. 
No ; the question is not one of possibility 
— miracles are always possible to any one 
who believes in a living God — it is entirely 
a question of evidence. And if we weigh it 
with care we shall be saved on the one 
hand from that enthusiasm for antiquity 
which imperils truth so seriously, and on 
the other from a negative scepticism which 
would deny the fact of a revelation of God 
to men in history. 



LECTURE V. 
THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 

3y Rev. SAMUEL HEMPHILL, B. 



r8i 



LECTURE V. 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 
HE natural man is determined not to 



J - accept the supernatural. But the life 
of Jesus embodies the supernatural. There- 
fore the natural man is determined not to 
accept the life of Jesus. He may very pro- 
bably accept the moral teaching of Jesus, or 
at least part of it ; but the historical life of 
Jesus he will not accept. 

It is at this point that Christianity and 
infidelity join issue. The historical life of 
Jesus is foolishness in the eyes of the 
natural man ; but for us Christians it is 
the very rock upon which all our hopes 
are built. We have been baptized into a 
personal and historical Jesus ; we have read 
and meditated on His words ; we have ad- 
mired His acts ; we have turned the eye 




1 84 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



of faith towards Him as hanging upon the 
cross of Calvary for our sins ; we have 
rejoiced at His resurrection from the grave 
in Joseph's garden ; we have been assured 
of His glorious ascension into heaven ; and 
regard Him as now representing and inter- 
ceding for us there. Our Christianity is, in 
short, bound up entirely and irrevocably in 
the personal Jesus of the Gospels ; and our 
belief in Him is founded on our belief in the 
entirely historical character of those ancient 
records. 

Now it is over half a century since Strauss 
in Germany endeavoured to construct a "life 
of Jesus " very different from that presented 
in the Gospels : a " life " from which every 
miraculous circumstance was rigidly elimi- 
nated. His theory was that the accepted 
account of Jesus was not historical, but a 
parcel of myths about a shadowy personage. 
The Gospels were treated by him as if they 
were little better than romances, of a piece 
with the legendary accounts of the infancy 
and childhood of Jesus which go by the 



THE LONG- LOST HARMONY. 185 

name of " the apocryphal gospels," and the 
so called " Clementine " fictions 1 about the 
state of the early Christian Church. In 
fact, the Gospels, according to Strauss, were 
scarcely more historical than the Homeric 
poems or the Scandinavian eddas. 

This theory, which was at hrst the property 
of a few in Germany, and rather tentatively 
presented for acceptance in England and 
other countries in a somewhat diluted form, 
seems of late to have gained a fresh lease of 
life, owing to the impetus which has been 
given to the study of Oriental religions. 

You are of course aware that, though 
Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, and other 
Oriental founders of religions were real per- 
sons, the accounts of their lives which are 
to be found in their sacred books are by no 
means historical, but contain a vast amount 
of legendary matter. 

1 The Cle7iientine Recognitions are translated in 
the third volume of T. & T. Clark's "Ante-Nicene 
Christian Library/ 3 and the Clementine Homilies in 
the eighteenth volume of the same series. 



1 86 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Now the happy thought struck some 
modern leaders of the attack on Christianity, 
that the history of Jesus is, after all, only of 
the same character as the traditional ac- 
counts of these Oriental founders of religions ; 
that they are all equally true and equally 
false ; and that, in short, a large body of 
legend and myth has attached itself to the 
name of an historical person, Jesus of 
Nazareth, who, like His Eastern rivals (or 
brethren !), went about doing good, and 
preaching His peculiar system of ethics ; 
who in due course fell a victim to the into- 
lerance of His fellow countrymen, and after 
His death somehow got to be regarded as a 
God by His ignorant and fanatical followers. 

We in Ireland have an instance of this accre- 
tion of myth round the person of a religious 
teacher, in the popular account of St. Patrick. 

No one doubts that there was such a 
person as Patrick, that he lived and taught 
in Ireland, and that his date was the middle 
of the fifth century. 

But later ages have each supplied their 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 187 

contribution of myth ; and the popular 
" lives " of the saint now current amongst 
the less educated classes of our countrymen 
have about as strong claim to be regarded as 
sober history as have the Idylls of the King. 

Now it is very important that we should 
remember that in cases where mythical 
stories gather round the name of an his- 
torical personage, this always happens long 
after his death, First, some real event in 
the life of the great man is exaggerated, and 
the door is thus opened for the entrance of 
the miraculous element ; then similar mira- 
culous stories are boldly invented, or stones 
that have long been current in the folk-lore 
of the country are attributed to the hero 
whom all delight to honour. 

From my home in the country I can 
plainly see the precipice from which the 
legend declares that Patrick drove all the 
snakes and toads into the nether regions ; 
yet seeing is not believing, and for this 
simple reason, that I know the legend was 
not current until some hundreds of years 



1 88 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

after the poor saint's bones had crumbled 
into dust at Saul, near Downpatrick. 

In the same way writers of the modern 
infidel or semi-infidel school allege that the 
miracles recounted in the Gospels are mere 
myths, like the accretions which the ocean of 
time has deposited round the names, let us 
say, of Buddha and St. Patrick. The Gospels, 
therefore, which contain this calcareous de- 
posit of myth must have come into their 
present shape long ages after the time when 
Jesus lived upon the earth. And this is now 
the well-defined battleground between belief 
and unbelief. The assailants of Christianity 
find themselves obliged to assign the compo- 
sition of the Gospels to a late date, so as to 
allow for the growth of the mythical ele- 
ment ; and so they allege that the title deeds 
of our faith were not written until the end of 
the second century. 

Perhaps some of you wonder why they do 
not allow more time than this, and put the 
composition of the Gospels to a still later date, 
say the end of the third or fourth century. 



THE LONG- LOST HARMONY. 189 



Well, be assured that they would dearly 
like to do so, but they cannot, because three 
celebrated Church writers who lived about 
the end of the second century — Irenseus, 
Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian — make 
such frequent and copious use of our Gospels 
in their extant writings, which are very volu- 
minous, that even the wildest sceptic cannot 
deny that these Gospels existed in their present 
form in the time of the aforesaid Fathers. 

Now it is my aim in the two lectures 
assigned to me to push the date of the com- 
position of the Gospels back from the end of 
the second century, when sceptics allow that 
they existed, to within measurable distance 
of the actual time when Christ lived upon the 
earth. I shall produce incontestable proof that 
our Gospels existed in their present form, to 
say the least, near the beginning of the second 
century, or in other words, within a few years 
of the lifetime of John, the last survivor of 
the group who " saw and heard and handled " 
the actual Person Jesus. Thus the mythical 
theory will be squeezed out for want of 



igo LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

room to breathe in ; and you will see that 
the life of Jesus differs from the accounts of 
Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster and the others, 
in this most vital particular, that it is drawn 
from histories which are all but contempora- 
neous with the person about whom they treat. 

But before examining any such evidence, 
it is our duty to remember that but few 
fragments of very early Christian literature 
have come down to us. So that we are not 
to be surprised if some things are brought 
forward which at first sight may seem in- 
significant. Amid the general wreck of 
early Church literature may no doubt be 
reckoned many allusions to the fourfold 
life of Jesus. But though much evidence 
has doubtless perished, through the ravages 
of time, yet sufficient remains, in the provi- 
dence of God, to confirm us in our most holy 
faith, and to furnish a weapon by which we 
can unhorse our assailants. 

By fixing the composition of our Gospels 
at the end of the second century, sceptical 
critics have ignored a work which has always 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 191 



been known by name in the Church as the 
Diatessaron of Tatian. In fact, the allusions 
to this work which have been gleaned from 
the scanty remains of early Christian litera- 
ture reach back as far as the first quarter 
of the fourth century, when Eusebius, the 
learned and accurate historian, wrote a notice 
of it. It was mentioned subsequently by Epi- 
phanius and Theodoret ; 1 and the latter was 
quite familiar with its form and character, for 
he found and examined over two hundred 
copies of it, in the diocese of Cyrrhus near the 
Euphrates, of which he was bishop A.D. 453. 

Now let it be noted at the outset that 
these three writers, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and 
Theodoret, however they may have differed 
in their knowledge of the book and their 
estimate of its value, stated plainly and pre- 
cisely, not only that it existed in their time, 
but that it was compiled by the celebrated 

1 References will be found in Lightfoot's Essays on 
Supernatural Religion, Salmon's I ntroductio?i to the 
New Testament, and my Diatessaron of Tatian, to 
which books the student is once for all referred. 



192 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



apologist Tatian, the friend and pupil of 
Justin Martyr. Of this Tatian we fortu- 
nately know a great deal, because we have 
his Apology, 1 which, it seems, he composed 
at Rome, not long after the middle of the 
second century. Those of you who have 
studied Justin Martyr's first Apology will 
understand that it was the practice of the 
advocates who in early times held a brief for 
Christianity to devote a large share of their 
attention to discredit the deities then wor- 
shipped at Rome and elsewhere. Tatian 
revels in this part of his task. His powers 
of ridicule and satire seem inexhaustible, and 
serve to portray the man as bold and in- 
cautious to a wonderful degree. Tatian also 
gives a short sketch of his own life up to 
the time when the Apology was composed. 
He recounts the fact that he was by birth an 
Assyrian, that is, a native of the country to 
the east of the Tigris, but which had been 

1 An English translation of this most interesting 
apology is contained in the third volume of T. & T. 
Clark's "Ante-Nicene Christian Library." 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 193 



included by Trajan in the Roman province 
of Syria. Throughout this province the 
vernacular was Syriac, but as there were 
many Greek-speaking merchants and officials 
there, Greek must have been well understood 
by the more educated classes of the com- 
munity. Tatian, at any rate, was trained in 
Greek literature, of which he was a diligent 
student. He also, like some others, as Justin 
and Theophilus, who afterwards became de- 
fenders of the Christian faith, on reaching 
manhood sought earnestly for some guide to 
teach him about the true God, and show him 
where he could find rest for his weary soul. 

According to his own account, he travelled 
from one country to another, but got satisfac- 
tion from no man. The heathen mysteries 
into which he had been initiated disgusted 
him by their revolting and licentious rites. 
He got to hate with perfect hatred those 
who were reputed to be gods ; and to despise 
from the bottom of his heart those who 
called themselves philosophers, on account of 
their covetousness. He was, like Mohammed, 

13 



194 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



a wandering searcher after light and truth ; 
but unlike Mohammed in that he found them. 
He happened to fall in with the Sacred 
Scriptures 1 (doubtless of the Old Testament). 
He read. He was delighted with the artless 
grandeur of their style. This, as long after- 
wards in Luther's case, began by attracting, 
and ended by convincing him. Nor did he 
fail to notice, as Justin had also noticed, that 
these Scriptures were far older than any of 
the heathen writings. 

The result was that he became an ardent 
Christian, and making his way to the im- 
perial city of Rome, attached himself to the 
school of Justin, whose lectures he attended, 
and whose persecutions he shared, even to 
the imminent peril of his life. 

Such are the gleanings which we can 
gather about the first part of Tatian's career. 
Imagination may perhaps be allowed tenta- 
tively to fill up the outline. We can think of 

1 He calls them the "barbaric writings" in his 
Apology, as this is the name which his heathen 
readers or hearers would understand. 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 195 



the close companionship of the two teachers ; 
we can follow them into their secluded re- 
fuge, perhaps in the famous catacombs ; we 
can think of how, like Paul and Silas, they 
must have cheered one another, in times of 
peril, by prayer and praise, and the remem- 
brance of the words and works of their mas- 
ter Jesus ; until at last they parted, one to 
drink the cup of martyrdom in this life, the 
other to hatch some unlucky opinion which 
would, like an avenging fury, pursue and 
blacken his memory through seventeen long 
centuries of posthumous martyrdom. 

After the death of the elder apologist, 
Tatian seems, from the little we can learn 
of him, to have continued for a time at 
Rome, where it is probable that he numbered 
among his pupils Clement, who afterwards 
became famous as the head of the great 
Christian school of Alexandria, and who 
has been already mentioned as one of the 
witnesses to the four Gospels at the end of 
the second century. During this residence 
at Rome Tatian probably wrote the greater 



196 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



number of his once numerous works, such 
as those on problems connected with the 
hidden and obscure things of the Old 
Testament, on Christian perfection, and on 
the epistles of St. Paul. All these have 
been lost, or, to speak more correctly, belong 
to the yet undiscovered mass of early litera- 
ture, so that we can hazard no opinion upon 
their nature or tendency. But if we are to 
be guided by what subsequent writers have 
recorded, we must come to the conclusion 
that Tatian developed some offensive and 
questionable opinions, and forfeited his fair 
fame as an orthodox Christian. The early 
Fathers at any rate are unanimous in de- 
nouncing him as a heretic, though they 
disagree as to the cause. Clement of Alex- 
andria, who had probably been his pupil, 
said that he regarded marriage as a sin ; 
and certainly we must all admit that it 
would be unfortunate if such an opinion 
should gain wide acceptance ! But it appears 
that Tatian did not stop even there, for 
Clement adds that he also committed him- 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 197 



self to the unpardonable prediction that 
beautiful hair and other adornments would 
entail punishment on their fair possessors! 

And passing to more theological but 
scarcely less speculative topics, we find that 
Irenaeus charged him with holding that 
Adam was not saved ; and that Origen said 
that he regarded God's words, " Let there be 
light," as a prayer. And when we come to 
Jerome, we find that lapse of time had done 
nothing to soften the distasteful epithets 
which were applied to poor Tatian, and that 
the monk of Bethlehem was able to supply 
a vocabulary more than sufficient for his 
purpose ! 

You have already heard that Tatian was 
a native of the Roman province of Syria, 
and it appears from Epiphanius that it was 
in that country that he ended his days, 
engaged, as we may fervently hope, in preach- 
ing the blessed Gospel to his still heathen 
countrymen. We must suppose either that 
he had been excommunicated by the church 
of Rome for his heretical writings and teach- 



198 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



ings, or that he had voluntarily retired from 
a sphere in which he felt that his power for 
good was gone. The proud and defiant 
author of the Apology was not the man to 
brook opposition, or to mince matters with 
his orthodox censors ; and we can well ima- 
gine the scornful farewell which he bade to 
the Church which he believed had treated 
him badly. At any rate, we have no choice 
but to hold that Epiphanius, our only in- 
formant, is right when he tells us that Tatian 
retired, after his Roman experiences, to the 
banks of the Euphrates. 

Such is the man to whom the authorship 
of the Diatessaron is attributed by Eusebius, 
Epiphanius, and Theodoret (not to mention 
later writers), and it now becomes our duty 
to inquire into the nature and contents of 
this, up to a recent date, shadowy and un- 
known work. 

The statement of Eusebius is as follows : 
" Tatian composed a sort of connexion and 
compilation, I know not how, of the Gospels, 
and called it the Diatessaron. This work is 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 199 



current in some quarters even to the present 
day." 

From this we learn that the work in 
question was compiled out of " the Gospels," 
which were as well known in Eusebius' time 
as in our own. And we can understand why 
the name " Diatessaron " should have been 
given to it, inasmuch as that is the Greek 
for "by the four." Indeed, the full title 
of the book as given by Epiphanius was 
" The Diatessaron Gospel," and as given by 
Theodoret, " The Gospel which is called 
Diatessaron." So that it was impossible for 
Christian writers to resist the inference that 
a kind of patchwork, composed of pieces of 
the four canonical Gospels, was current in 
the early Church ; and that it was composed 
by Tatian, who, as we have seen, flourished 
in the time of Justin Martyr, or about the 
middle of the second century. 

It may be well, perhaps, to remark in 
passing, that the compilation of passages 
from the four canonical Gospels into one 
connected narrative has not been unknown 



200 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



in more recent times. The sisters of Little 
Gidding in the seventeenth century spent 
many of their leisure hours in this work; 1 
and a specimen of their harmonizing skill 
was a few years ago exhibited in Dublin at 
the Decorative Art Exhibition. And even so 
late as A.D. 1888 Mr. Frederic F. Hamilton 
published at Paris a French compilation of 
a very complete character, with the title 
L Evangile des Evangiles. 

But to return to our subject. The 
sceptical school, in fixing the composition 
of the Gospels at the end of the second 
century, inadvertently or designedly omitted 
to notice the immense difficulty under which 
their speculations laboured, owing to these 
and other historical references to a com- 
pilation from the four Gospels made by 
a man who cannot have been born much 
later than A.D. 120, or twenty years after the 
death of John who leaned on Jesus' breast 
at supper. But as Christian writers were 

1 A pleasant and sympathetic account of them is 
given in JoJm Inglesant, by Mr. Shorthouse. 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 201 



not slow to produce these references in 
evidence, it became necessary for their op- 
ponents to face the difficulty, and it will 
doubtless entertain you to know what they 
had to say about the Diatessaron. 

Some affirmed that as the word " Diates- 
saron " was a term borrowed from Greek 
music, it only implied perfect harmony, 
without necessary limitation to four. But 
the derivation may just as likely be from 
medicine, where " Diatessaron " means a com- 
pound of four ingredients, as has been lately 
proved. 1 

But I must quote some statements from 
a trashy book called Supernatural Religion, 
which was quite the rage amongst English 
sceptics some years ago. 

" There is therefore no authority for saying 
that Tatian's Gospel was a harmony of four 
Gospels at all, and the name ' Diatessaron ' 
was not only not given by Tatian himself 
to the work, but was merely the usual fore- 

1 By Dr. Quarry, see Salmon's Introduction, p. 83, 
ed. 4. 



202 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



gone conclusion of the Christians of the 
third and fourth centuries that everything 
in the shape of evangelical literature must 
be dependent on the Gospels adopted by the 
Church." 1 
And again : 

" No one seems to have seen Tatian's 
Harmony, probably for the very simple reason 
that there was no such work." 2 

And again : 

" It is obvious that there is no evidence 
whatever connecting Tatian's Gospel with 
those in our canon." 3 

I think that the thing which will soon be 
really obvious to us all is that the person 
who thus ignores the plain statements of 
credible historians like Eusebius and Theo- 
doret merely puts himself out of court. 

Now remember that the two points which 
are here denied are, first, that a compilation 

1 Complete ed., vol. ii., p. 154, changes "merely" 
into " probably." 

2 Complete ed., p. 156. 

3 Complete ed., vol. ii., p. 157, changes " whatever" 
into " of any value." 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 203 



of the four Gospels ever existed which would 
answer to the description of Eusebius ; and, 
second, that any such compilation had a right 
to be attributed to Tatian. We shall soon 
be able to test the value of these denials. 

Up to the present I have told you only 
a little of what Eusebius, Epiphanius, and 
Theodoret said about the Diatessaron; but 
I have not yet indicated the quarter from 
which the most copious information comes to 
us on the subject. 

It is only lately that any but a very small 
minority of scholars have given much atten- 
tion to the study of Oriental Christian litera- 
ture. The generality seemed too well satisfied 
with the treasures of Latin and Greek Church 
writers to turn their thoughts towards the vast 
Oriental resources which enterprise had put 
within their reach. And to this must be attri- 
buted the ignorance of the Diatessaron which 
prevailed so generally until a few years ago. 
The Greek and Latin Church writers were 
ransacked for some further information about 
the lost Harmony, but none was forthcoming. 



204 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Though an anonymous Harmony in Latin, 
which answered to the description of Euse- 
bius, had indeed been found and edited by 
Victor, Bishop of Capua, in the middle of 
the sixth century, and though he had 
conjectured that it was none other than the 
Diatessaron of Tatian, yet it has never, till 
quite lately, been proved whether he was 
right or wrong. Indeed, it was generally 
assumed by those who wrote on the subject 
at all, that Victor had made a mistake. But 
be that as it may, except for this one con- 
jecture, which seemed incapable of verifica- 
tion, Western Christian literature furnished 
no clue to the Diatessaron. 

But on turning our attention to the 
literature of the East, we are able to fill the 
void which has so long been the crux of 
orthodox critics. 

You will recollect that Tatian was born in 
a country whose vernacular was Syriac, and 
that it was to this country that he retreated 
after he left Rome. You will also recollect 
that Theodoret is the only one of the early 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 205 



Fathers who mentions the Diatessaron as a 
book with which he was thoroughly ac- 
quainted. Now Theodoret was the bishop 
of a diocese in which Syriac was the verna- 
cular, and it will therefore not surprise you 
to be told that it is to Syriac literature that 
we must go for the clue to this interesting 
problem. At any rate, history begins to find 
her voice the moment we touch Syrian soil ; 
and we seem to have at last traced the long- 
lost Harmony to its source. 

But it will be convenient for you, in the 
first place, to learn the exact words of Theo- 
doret himself. 

" He (Tatian) composed the Gospel which 
is called 'Diatessaron,' cutting out the genea- 
logies and such other passages as show the 
Lord to have been born of the seed of David 
after the flesh. This work was in use not 
only among persons belonging to his sect, 
but also among those who follow the apo- 
stolic doctrine, as they did not perceive the 
mischief of the composition, but used the 
book in all simplicity on account of its 



2o6 LITERA TURE OF SECOND CENTUR Y. 



brevity. And I myself found more than two 
hundred such copies held in respect in the 
churches in our parts. All these I collected 
and put away, and I replaced them by the 
Gospels of the four evangelists." 1 

Here are the statements of an eye-witness, 
who was perfectly familiar with the book, 
who had handled many copies of it, and had 
minutely examined its contents. And this 
witness, who was a man of vast reputation 
as a writer of candour and scholarship, and 
who was well acquainted with the past 
history of his Church, accepted it as an un- 
doubted fact that the book had been com- 
piled by Tatian. Indeed, it is not at all 
unlikely that this very circumstance, that it 
was the unquestioned work of Tatian the 
heretic, was a more serious blemish in the 
eyes of the zealous bishop than any internal 

1 Lightfoot's renderings are nearly always adopted. 
Dr. Dale, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, 
pp. 156, 158, inadvertently attributes translations to 
me, which I (Diatessaron, p. xiv., note 1) had stated 
were adopted from Lightfoot's Essay. 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 207 



defect, such as the omission of our Lord's 
genealogies ; and that he acted in very much 
the same manner as a Romish bishop in 
Ireland would act at the present day, if 
he were to suppress the Protestant Bible 
throughout his diocese on account of its 
Protestant associations, rather than for any 
imperfection of rendering which he might 
perceive in it. 

We can easily picture for ourselves the 
scenes which must have taken place when 
Theodoret and his archdeacon and other 
subordinates went round the eight hundred 
parishes of the diocese ofCyrrhus, seeking for 
the old Harmony, and confiscating it, to the 
infinite chagrin of the simple parish priests 
and their simpler flocks, who had been ac- 
customed from infancy to hear from its pages 
the story of redeeming love. It must indeed 
have been endeared to them as an old- 
fashioned Church book, which their fathers 
and grandfathers had fondly venerated, and 
which was the subject of many stories of the 
early days of Syrian Christianity. 



2o8 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Of these stones a specimen may be found 
in a curious old Syriac writing, which was 
brought to light A.D. 1864. It is called the 
Doctrine of Addai, and it gives a kind of 
legendary history of the founding of the 
Church at Edessa, in the time of good King 
Abgar. I must quote the words which bear 
on our subject : 1 

" And they ministered in the church 
which Addai had built at the order and 
command of King Abgar, and they were 
furnished with what belonged to the king 
and to his nobles with some things for the 
house of God, and others for the supply of 
the poor. But a large multitude of people 
assembled day by day, and came to the 
prayers of the service, and to the reading 
of the Old Testament and the New of the 
Diatessafon" 

It is not necessary for us to regard this 
account as strictly historical, indeed it reads 
more like an historical romance ; but it does 

1 From Cureton's Ancient Syriac Documents. 
(London, 1864.) 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 209 

not follow that its evidence is therefore 
worthless. There are many interesting 
historical details to be learned from Sir 
Walter Scott's novels ; indeed, it was the 
object of that writer to preserve strict 
verisimilitude in all his stories. And we 
may be sure that the traditions and cus- 
toms which he records had a real existence 
amongst the people to whom he attributes 
them. In the same way, the least that 
can be said about the Doctrine of Addai is, 
that at the time of its composition the 
Diatessaron must have been the form in 
which the Gospel was commonly read at 
daily service in the Syrian churches with 
which the writer was familiar. And, as the 
romance may perhaps date back as early as 
the third century, this would prove that for at 
least one hundred years the Diatessaron had 
been a well-known book among the Syrians ; 
and that many ages before the visitation 
when Bishop Theodoret went round his 
diocese to suppress it, the simple country- 
folk (like Englishmen at the time of the 

14 



2io LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Reformation) had been accustomed to 
gather round and drink in attentively the 
words of eternal life which were read from 
its pages, as it lay upon the desk of their 
rural sanctuary. 

Nor was the use of the Diatessaron con- 
fined to the less educated members of the 
Church. Two great figures shine out 
brightly in the Syrian ecclesiastical history 
of the fourth century — Aphraates, " the Per- 
sian Sage," who was a great teacher at 
Mossul (Nineveh) about A.D. 340 ; and 
Ephraem, "the Harp of the Holy Spirit," 
so called for his eminence as a hymn-writer, 
who lived and laboured at Edessa, about 
twenty years later. 

The lamented Professor William Wright, 
well known in our University, in his edition 
of the Homilies of Aphraates, published A.D. 
1869, remarked this author's practice of 
" mixing up the words of two or more pas- 
sages of Scripture " in his citation of texts ; 
and Professor Zahn, in what must be re- 
garded as the classical work on the Diates- 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 211 

saron y which he published A.D. 1881, 1 has 
satisfactorily demonstrated that these com- 
posite citations of Aphraates are due to his 
habitual use of Tatian's Harmony. 

But the case of Ephraem is even more 
striking. Remember that he taught at 
Edessa, a town in the neighbourhood of 
which it is possible that Tatian preached 
after his return from Rome. And so great 
was his fame that Gregory of Nyssa could 
say in his funeral oration that the splendour 
of his life and teaching had shone throughout 
the whole world : an encomium which we 
can quite understand, when we consider not 
only the deep spirituality of his hymns and 
expositions which we still have, 2 but the sur- 
prisingly voluminous nature of his works 
which were once extant. 3 

You will, however, be disappointed to learn 
that Ephraem, though estimable in almost 

1 At Erlangen. 

2 See Select Metrical Hymns a?td Homilies of Eph- 
raem Syms, translated from the Syriac by the Rev. H. 
Burgess, Ph.D. (London, 1853.) 

3 Three million lines (Sozomen, E. H. iii. 16). 



212 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



every other way, was by no means an ad- 
mirer of the fair sex. Though connected 
with the divinity school of Edessa, we have 
no record that he ever lectured to an audi- 
ence of young ladies. It Is true that Edessa 
was perhaps not so fortunate as to contain 
an institution like the Alexandra College ; 
but in any case Ephraem would hardly have 
felt quite at his ease before an audience of 
ladies, as you may judge from the following 
anecdote, which is related of his entrance into 
Edessa. 1 

"As he entered the city, a number of 
women were engaged in washing linen on 
the banks of the river Daisan, and as one 
of them looked at him more intently than 
seemed becoming, he rebuked her, saying, 
'Be modest, O woman, and fix thy look 
upon the ground.' 'It is quite right,' she 
answered, ' for men to look upon the ground, 
for out of it they were taken ; but for the 
same reason I may surely look at thee, for 

1 See Dean Payne Smith's article Ephraem, in 
Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography. 



THE LONG-LOST HARMOXY. 213 

woman was taken out of man.' 1 If the 
women here,' he said, as he passed on, ' are 
so wise, what must the men be ? ' " 

But if Ephraem delivered no lectures to 
young women, he is believed to have deli- 
vered many to young men. Indeed, there 
is good reason to suppose that a large 
portion of the matter which he has left in 
the form of commentaries on the Scriptures 
came to be composed originally for the 
instruction of his class of divinity stu- 
dents. 

Xow the connexion of Ephraem with the 
Diatessaron of Tatian is a point of the 
greatest interest. For many centuries it has 
been believed that he wrote an exposition of 
the Gospel narrative, taking the Diatessaron 
as his basis ; and this tradition has been 
recorded by many Syrian writers. The first 
and greatest of these, from whom indeed the 
others seem to have copied, is Dionysius 
Bar-Salibi, who was bishop of Amida in the 
closing years of the twelfth century, and 
whose own commentary on the Gospels is 



214 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

now very highly valued by Syriac scholars. 
In the preface to his commentary on St. 
Mark, Bar-Salibi writes as follows : 

" Tatian, the disciple of Justin, the philo- 
sopher and martyr, selected and patched 
together from the four Gospels, and con- 
structed a Gospel, which he called ' Diates- 
saron,' that is Miscellanies. On this work 
Mar Ephraem wrote an exposition ; and its 
commencement was, ' In the beginning was 
the Word! " 1 

It is hard to imagine a statement more 
explicit than this, or more calculated to con- 
vince reasonable minds. It was made with 
the utmost deliberation by a writer of learn- 
ing and credit ; but the opponents of ortho- 
dox Christianity thought themselves justified 
in ignoring it on the ground of the lateness 
of the testimony. The irrational nature of 
this treatment was ably shown by the 
lamented Bishop (then Professor) Lightfoot, 
in an article in the Contemporary Review ', 
May, 1877, in which Bar-Salibi was held to 
1 Lightfoot's version. 



THE LOXG-LOST HARMONY. 215 

be " worthy of all credit,'' in his statement 
that Ephraem wrote a commentary on the 
Diatessaron of Tatian. 

And this conclusion of our great English 
theologian was soon splendidly verified by 
the appearance of the commentary itself, 
which, as a matter of fact, had already been 
published in a Latin form at Venice, A.D. 
1876, but did not make its way to England 
till some years after. 

As this is one of the most interesting and 
valuable contributions to theology made in 
the present century, you will like to hear a 
few particulars about it. 

The medium through which it came was 
the to us almost entirely unknown Arme- 
nian language. You have perhaps heard 
that the monaster}- of San Lazzaro at Venice, 
founded almost two centuries ago by an 
Armenian priest named Mechitar, has ever 
since remained the focus of Armenian learn- 
ing and culture. It contains a valuable 
collection of ancient Armenian manuscripts, 
including a Ritual of the eighth century; 



lib LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

the Bible of Melke, Queen of Armenia, 
written in the year 902 ; and last, but not 
least, two twelfth century copies of an Ar- 
menian version, made apparently in the fifth 
century from the Syriac, of Ephraem's com- 
mentary on a Gospel Harmony. 

The monks have a printing press of their 
own, and over half a century ago (a.D. 1836) 
printed an Armenian edition of St. Ephraem's 
works, which contained the commentary on 
the Gospel Harmony. Moreover, a Latin 
translation of this last was made so long ago 
as A.D. 1 84 1 by Father Aucher, who is well 
known in connexion with the Armenian 
version of the Bible ; but this Latin version 
remained in manuscript until Professor 
Moesinger of Salzburg had the distinguished 
honour of revising and publishing it, A.D. 
1876. 

Such is a brief sketch of the history of this 
most opportune publication, which a few 
years ago caused a general panic in the 
sceptical camp. It is impossible on the 
present occasion to enter into any detailed 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 217 



criticism of its internal character, but I may 
mention that competent scholars have satis- 
fied themselves on the following points : 

(1) That the Armenian work is a rather 
servile version of a Syriac original made 
about the fifth century. 

(2) That internal evidence conclusively 
points to Ephraem as the author. 

(3) That the basis of the commentary is a 
Gospel Harmony, such as would fully answer 
to the description of Eusebius and Theodoret. 

The irresistible conclusion therefore is that 
this is the very commentary mentioned by 
Dionysius Bar-Salibi ; and that its basis was 
the very Diatessaron mentioned by Eusebius, 
Theodoret, the author of the Doctrine of 
Addai, and others. 

We have a common proverb that " it 
never rains but it pours," and this has been 
verified in the case of the Diatessaron. For 
no sooner had theologians recast their 
methods of dealing with the Tatian contro- 
versy, consequent on the appearance of 
Moesinger's book, than they were again 



218 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



startled by the publication at Rome, A.D. 
1888, of the Diatessaron itself in the form 
of an Arabic translation made in the eleventh 
century from the Syriac. The editor of this 
work was Father Ciasca, of the Vatican 
Library, one of the greatest living Coptic 
scholars ; and he not only subjoined a Latin 
version of the Arabic, but wrote an interest- 
ing preface giving an account of the occasion 
and reason of the publication, and of the 
manuscripts from which the text was drawn. 

It is unnecessary for us to do more than 
notice that one of the manuscripts contains 
notes at the beginning and end in which the 
reader is informed that he has before him 
an Arabic translation of Tatian's Diatessaron, 
that it was made from the Syriac, and that 
the translator was " the most learned pres- 
byter Abu-l-Pharag Abdullah Ben-at-Tib." 

Comparing the Latin version of this 
Arabic Diatessaron with the Latin version 
of the fragments of the Harmony which 
Ephraem used, we cannot for a moment 
doubt that they represent the very same 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 219 

original compilation. Further, we are able 
without difficulty to restore that compilation, 
so as to learn the principle upon which it was 
made, the materials of which it was composed, 
and the type of text to which it belonged. 

So much for the recovery of the Diates- 
saron. Let me now briefly recapitulate the 
evidence for connecting it with Tatian ; for 
that is the point of our present inquiry. 

1. We have the negative evidence that 
only two 1 Diatessarons, those of Tatian and 
Ammonius, are mentioned in extant Church 
literature, or were discoverable by Victor, 
the learned bishop of Capua, in the sixth 
century. 

And as the present Harmony differs in 
principle and detail from the Diatessaron of 
Ammonius, as described by Eusebius, while 
it agrees with the Diatessaron of Tatian, as 
described by several writers, it is only 
reasonable to infer that this Harmony is the 
Diatessaron of Tatian. 

1 Bar-Salibi speaks of a third, otherwise unknown, 
by Elias of Salamia. See Lightfoot's Essays, p. 280, 



220 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

2. And Bar-Salibi is absolutely conclusive 
on this point ; for he distinctly states that 
Tatian compiled the Harmony upon which 
Ephraem wrote a commentary, and the pre- 
sent work is that Harmony. 

3. Independent witness to Tatian's author- 
ship is also found in the notes at the begin- 
ning and end of the Arabic edition of the 
same Harmony. 

4. And this authorship by one who was a 
Syrian, not only by birth, but by residence 
during the later years of his life, accords with 
the traditional reading of the Diatessaron at 
the founding of the Church of Edessa ; its 
use by Aphraates, the great preacher of 
Mossul, and by Ephraem, the poet and 
commentator of Edessa ; its wide circulation 
throughout the diocese of Cyrrhus ; its 
textual resemblance to the old Syriac 
Gospels edited by Cureton ; its translation 
from Syriac into Arabic in the eleventh 
century ; and, in a word, its exclusively 
Syrian history. 

We have thus maintained our two points 



THE LONG-LOST HARMONY. 221 



that the Diatessaron existed, and that it was 
compiled by Tatian. 

Now recollect that the Diatessaron is a 
patchwork composed of pieces of our four 
Gospels, and of them alone ; and that for 
the purpose of forming a connected narrative 
of the life of our Lord, this teacher in the 
second century was in precisely the same 
position as the Sisters of Little Gidding in 
the seventeenth. The four Gospels therefore, 
which held an unique and revered position 
in the seventeenth century, held exactly the 
same position in the third quarter of the 
second century. They were at that early 
date in undisputed possession of the field, as 
the only authentic form of apostolic tradi- 
tion. The statement therefore that they were 
composed in their present form at or near 
the end of the second century can no longer 
be made by any one who cares to avoid the 
imputation of downright ignorance. 



LECTURE VI. 

EARLY VESTIGES OF THE FOURFOLD 
GOSPEL. 

By Rev. SAMUEL HEMPHILL, B.D. 



223 



LECTURE VI. 



EARLY VESTIGES OF THE FOURFOLD 



SHORT time a^o, as I was travelling 



x in the train, a friend kindly handed me 
a shilling volume in which the chief religions 
of the world were described and compared, 
Christianity being considerately given a place 
with the systems of Buddha, Zoroaster, Con- 
fucius, and others ; something like the way 
in which the Roman emperor, Alexander 
SeveriiSj allowed our Lord's statue a place 
near those of Jupiter, Mercury, and the other 
classical divinities. Glancing at the title- 
page, I saw that the little book had already 
run through ten editions (and, for all I know, 
it may now have run through ten more) ; 
and then turning to the rather subordinate 
chapter which dealt with the Christian 



GOSPEL. 




226 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Gospels, I gained the interesting information 
that these records had been composed at the 
end of the second century. 

Now it is quite possible that some of you 
have seen, or may see, such a book ; and 
therefore it will not be out of place to lay a 
few hard facts before you, which will enable 
you effectively to criticise the cavalier manner 
in which the title-deeds of our faith are 
treated in these sceptical productions, which 
seem to have gained the ear of a portion of 
the thinking public. 

We have already considered the Diates- 
saro?i of Tatian, the compilation of portions 
of our four Gospels which was made by a 
celebrated teacher who flourished at Rome 
somewhere about the middle of the second 
century. 

I must however tell you that the compila- 
tion of the Diatessaron belongs probably to 
the close of Tatian's career, after he had for 
ever left the great Western capital, and buried 
himself among the wild heathen people of the 
East ; and therefore we must follow Zahn, the 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 227 

great German specialist, in placing its date 
somewhere about A.D. 172. 

So that, even according to this estimate, 
in which we allow our opponents the full 
length of tether to which they can possibly 
be entitled, the four Gospels which we now 
have were harmonized into a single narra- 
tive, probably for the sake of instructing 
Tatian's Syrian converts, about thirty years 
before they were composed, according to 
sceptical shilling books ! 

But the materials of a patchwork must 
have come into being, not after, but before 
the patchwork itself. The richly variegated 
counterpanes which are such a pleasing 
feature in the cottages of our peasant neigh- 
bours are evidently composed of pieces of 
calico and other materials which have already 
done service in some other capacity. The 
shells and pebbles which we see embedded in 
the matrix of a conglomerate rock must first 
have had a separate existence, washed by the 
waves on some prehistoric sea-shore. 

And according to the same universal law, 



228 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



it is evident that the four Gospels, out of 
which a patchwork was made in or about 
A.D. 172, cannot have been themselves com- 
posed that year, but must have existed years 
before. We must allow sufficient time to 
enable these various records, emanating as 
they evidently did from various countries, to 
have been written, published, disseminated 
through the world, brought together, studied 
by Tatian, and recognised by him as the 
exclusively authentic form of apostolic tradi- 
tion. They must have been sufficiently long 
in the world to have outstripped all rival 
records, and established their own unique 
character. 

Now it is hard to believe that all this could 
have taken place in one decade, or even two. 
It generally takes a few years for a book 
now-a-days to become widely and popularly 
known, even with all the modern machinery 
of advertising and reviewing. And this was 
even more true of the early days, before the 
invention of printing ; and more especially 
with books which were not popular, but 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 229 



belonged to a sect which was everywhere 
spoken against. 

We conclude therefore that the four 
Gospels cannot have been very new when 
Tatian compiled his Diatessaron out of them. 
And we feel justified in pushing them back, 
provisionally at least, to A.D. 150. 

But perhaps you say, " This date, which the 
lecturer now assigns to the Gospels, is nearly 
120 years after the events of the life of Jesus, 
and probably eighty years after the time at 
which we were taught to believe that these 
records were written ; and it is about half a 
century after the death of St. John, the last 
of the apostles." 

Now all this may be admitted, and yet we 
may hold that it would not necessarily in- 
validate the authenticity of the Gospels. For 
we may legitimately urge that, though we 
could not trace them to an earlier date than 
A.D. 150, yet that would not prove that they 
did not exist earlier. Moreover, we may 
remind you that the larger part of the 
Christian literature of the second century has 



230 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



perished, and that this fact is enough to 
account for the lack of definite and full in- 
formation about the early reception of the 
Gospels. And, finally, we may cry out against 
the unfairness of demanding documentary 
attestation of the Gospels, greater in amount 
and earlier in date than would be demanded 
in the case of any secular writer. The 
learned Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, 
in his Introduction to the Books of the New 
Testament?- gives an interesting example of 
this. He notices that the plays of Terence 
are quoted by Cicero and Horace, and that 
we require neither more nor earlier witnesses. 
Yet Cicero and Horace wrote a hundred 
years after Terence. So that it is unfair of 
those who receive the witness of Cicero and 
Horace to Terence to refuse to accept 
similar evidence to the Gospels. 

But we are not obliged to stand on our 

1 To this work, and to Lightfoot's Essays, the 
student is referred for information about the use of 
the Gospels by Justin and Papias. Westcott, Canon 
of the New Testament, should also be consulted. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 231 

strict rights in this matter. Fortunately, in 
spite of the almost general wreck of early 
Church literature, the wise providence of God 
has left us some very interesting and very 
plain vestiges of the fourfold Gospel, which 
I shall now endeavour to present briefly to 
your notice. 

We have already conjectured that the 
Gospels out of which Tatian made his com- 
pilation about A.D. 172 must have existed at 
least twenty years before. I have now to 
verify this conjecture, and prove that in point 
of fact they were used by a celebrated Church 
writer about that date. 

You remember that Tatian was the friend 
and pupil of Justin Martyr ; that they lived 
and taught in the same city of Rome, were 
persecuted by the same adversaries, shared 
the same dangers. Is it not natural then to 
expect that the same records of the life and 
words of Jesus which Tatian knew and used 
were known also to Justin, and used by him 
in his literary labours ? 

Fortunately we have sufficient material 



232 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

from which to draw a pretty full account of 
Justin's life ; for three authentic works of his 
are in our hands, his two Apologies, and his 
Dialogue with the Jew Trypho ; and these 
documents furnish the following sketch of his 
history : 

He lived at Neapolis, the ancient Shechem, 
and was, as he himself says, a Samaritan — 
not indeed by race or religion, but by resi- 
dence. As we saw in the case of Tatian, 
Justin was skilled in Greek literature ; like 
Tatian too, he set out in search of a creed 
which could satisfy the cravings of his soul. 
First he applied to a Stoic teacher, but quickly 
transferred his attention to a Peripatetic. 
The latter soon overshot the mark by de- 
manding payment for his instructions ; and 
Justin tried a Pythagorean. But he gave the 
discouraging information that it would be 
necessary for Justin to learn music, astro- 
nomy, and geometry, before he could learn 
about God. The soul of a seeker after truth 
is naturally impatient of delay, and so Justin 
next tried a follower of Plato, from whom he 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 233 

learned a surer and better philosophy. He 
tells us that " the contemplation of the Ideas 
gave wings to his mind," and that he used 
often to seek solitary places, in which he 
could meditate on the deep truths which he 
had been taught. When, one day, walking 
on the sea-shore, he met an old man, who 
began to question him on the higher life ; 
and finding that his soul was still unsatisfied, 
pointed him to Christ. Justin felt that it 
was philosophy which had thus led him to 
his Saviour ; and he was the more impressed 
with Christianity on account of the unworld- 
liness of its adherents, and their bravery 
when subjected by the authorities to the 
most cruel persecutions. 

We are told that henceforth, under the 
garb of the philosopher, he played the part 
of the Christian advocate. Like Paul, he 
held discussions in the public places, and 
in a private residence. The Dialogue with 
Trypho may serve to give us some idea of 
the method of his reasoning ; and the two 
Apologies, composed in the reign of Antoninus 



234 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Pius (the first dating from about A.D. 150), 
display his fearless advocacy of the cause 
which he had embraced. 

Let us leave Church history to finish the 
story of Justin's life, and to chronicle his 
martyrdom, while we turn to his extant 
writings to find out whether they can throw 
any light on the early reception of our four 
Gospels. 

Now, in the first place, it must be noted 
that Justin constantly quotes the words and 
acts of the Saviour's life from a written 
source. He constantly uses the word 76- 
rypairrai (it is written) when referring to some 
circumstance about the life of Jesus. Now 
the use of this word yeyparrrai implies much, 
for it is the word which the Saviour Him- 
self used when pointing to the passages of 
the Old Testament which referred to His 
person. The presumption therefore is, that 
Justin placed the written source from which 
he got his information on somewhat the 
same footing as the Old Testament Scrip- 
tures, which holy men of God spake and 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 235 



wrote as they were borne along by the Holy 
Ghost. 

Our next point is, that this written source 
of information which Justin used seems to 
have contained exactly what our present 
Gospels contain. If the creed of Justin be 
pieced together from what he says of the 
Saviour, drawing his information from this 
written source, the result will be found to be 
that, except for two or three exceedingly 
minute points, he never travels beyond our 
present Gospels. He knows only what we 
know. The presumption then is, that his 
written source of information was at least 
similar to ours. 

But another remarkable fact is also clear. 
The written source which Justin quotes for 
his facts about the Saviours life is not one 
homogeneous book, but several books, and 
to these he gives the name Gospels, and says 
that they were written by " the apostles.'" 

Now this is a point well worthy of atten- 
tion, for sceptical critics have eagerly taken 
hold of the fact that Justin generally calls 



236 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



his written source of information Memoirs. 
We must admit that this is his usual and 
oft-reiterated name ; but under the circum- 
stances, is it not quite natural? Remember, 
that in the three books of Justin which have 
come down to us, he is dealing with those 
outside the Church, those who are opponents 
of Christianity. Now what more natural 
than that he should employ a general and 
vulgar word, which every one would under- 
stand, in order to convey to these Jewish 
and heathen adversaries some idea of what 
he was talking about ? Justin had reached 
Christianity through philosophy ; he would 
therefore be the very last to scruple to use 
secular words to express Christian ideas ; 
and as a matter of fact this is what we find 
him doing in other cases also. He not only 
employs philosophical terminology, but con- 
forms to popular idiom. 

But though it is true that he usually calls 
his written sources by this general name of 
Memoirs, yet in one passage {Apol. i. 66) 
he calls them Gospels in such a way as to 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 237 



indicate that he knew this to be their proper 
technical name. The passage is as follows : 

" For the apostles, in the Memoirs which 
were written by them, which are called 
Gospels, thus handed down that they were 
commanded." 

Is it not evident that in this passage 
Justin so far departs from his general prac- 
tice of using popular words as to explain 
that not Memoirs but Gospels was the accu- 
rate title of his written records ? 

And in a similar incidental way he says 
in another place {Dialogue, chap. 103), that 
these records which he generally ascribes 
to apostles in a wide sense were compiled 
by " His (Christ's) apostles, and those who 
followed them " ; thus giving prominence to 
the fact that some of the Gospels were written 
by apostles, and others by the followers of 
apostles. 

Could there possibly be a more striking 
resemblance to the traditional authorship of 
our Gospels : two of which were written by 
apostles, Matthew and John ; and two by 



238 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY 



followers of apostles, Mark the follower of 
Peter, and Luke the follower probably of 
John P 1 

We hold then that, without actually men- 
tioning the names 2 of the writers of these 
Gospels (which would have been entirely 
out of conformity with his usual practice 
when writing for outsiders), Justin has most 
accurately described their authorship in a 
way which can hardly be resisted by any 
candid mind. 

I must trouble you with one more passage 
of Justin referring to his written source of 
information before I go on to notice some of 
the quotations themselves. 

In the sixty-seventh chapter of the first 
Apology he says : 

1 See a most suggestive paper by the Rev. H. R. 
Poole, D.D., Senior Fellow T.C.D., on The Origin oj 
the Gospel according to St. Luke. (McGee, Dublin.) 

2 Justin, Dialogue 106, appears to quote St. Mark's 
Gospel as " The Memoirs of Peter? This is the excep- 
tion to his usual practice; and would point to the 
fact, attested by early tradition, that Mark was the 
interpreter of Peter, and drew his materials from him. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 239 



"And on the day which is called the day 
of the sun there is an assembling together of 
all who live in the cities or in the country, 
and the Memoirs of the apostles or the 
writings of the prophets are read." 

Here then we have the written records of our 
Lord's life, which, as we have seen, contained 
what we now read in our Gospels, which 
were technically called Gospels, and were 
written by the apostles and their followers, 
placed on a distinct footing of equality with 
the prophets of the Old Testament, like Isaiah 
and Jeremiah, and read in precisely the same 
way that we now read our Gospels in the 
public service of the Church on Sundays. 

From all this I think that we may fairly 
conclude that Justin knew and used our 
present Gospels ; and this presumption can- 
not be dispersed by a recital of the actual 
quotations themselves. For though we must 
admit great and frequent instances of in- 
accuracy in Justin's Gospel-citations, yet 
there are important considerations to account 
for this, as we shall presently see. 



240 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

I shall now cite some examples of Justin's 
quotations, 1 that you may judge whether 
they be the very words of our Gospels or not. 

Let us first take those which agree more 
or less with our St. Matthew. 

Apol. i. 1 6. 

But whosoever shall be angry shall be in 
danger of the fire. {Matt. v. 22.) 

And whosoever compelleth thee to go a 
mile, follow with him two. (Matt. v. 41.) 

And let your good works shine before 
men, that seeing, they may admire your 
Father in the heavens. (Matt. v. 16.) 

Swear not at all, but let your yea be yea, 
and your nay, nay : whatsoever is more than 
these is of the evil. (Matt. v. 34, 37.) 

Apol i. 15. 
Do not these things to be seen of men, 
otherwise ye have no reward of your Father 
who is in the heavens. (Matt. vi. 1.) 

1 A discussion and classification of these citations 
is given in Zahn, Geschichte des Neatest. Kano7ts, 
vol. ii. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 241 



Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon 
the earth, where moth and rust corrupt, and 
thieves break through ; but lay up for your- 
selves treasure in heaven, where neither moth 
nor rust corrupt. For where treasure is, there 
also is the mind of man. {Matt. vi. 19.) 

Dial. 51. 

The law and the prophets were until John 
the Baptist. From which time the kingdom 
of the heavens suffereth violence, 1 and the 
violent take it by force. And if ye will 
receive it, this is Elias, who was to come. 
He that hath ears to hear let him hear. 
(Matt. xi. 1 2.) 

Dial. 49. 

Elias shall come and restore all things. 
But I say to you that Elias has already 
come, and they recognised him not, but did 
to him whatsoever they wished. {Matt. xvii. 
11, 12.) 

Dial. 17. 

Whi ted sepulchres, appearing beautiful 

1 Or (more probably) advanceth violently. 

16 



242 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



without, but within full of dead men's bones. 
{Matt, xxiii, 27.) 

Dial. 112. 

Who exalt themselves and desire to be 
called Rabbi, Rabbi. {Matt, xxiii. 7. 12.) 



Citations which appear to be from St. 
Luke. 

Dial. 103. 

His sweat fell down like drops, while He 
prayed and said, Let this cup pass away if 
possible. {Luke xxii. 44.) 

Apol. i. 33. Dial. 100. 
But the Virgin Mary, having received faith 
and grace, when the angel Gabriel announced 
to her, The Spirit of the Lord shall come 
upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall 
overshadow thee, wherefore also that which 
shall be born of thee is holy, the Son of 
God ; answered, Be it to me according to 
thy word. {Luke i. 35, 38.) 

Dial. 76. 

I give you power to tread upon serpents 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 243 

and scorpions, and over all the power of the 
enemy. {Luke x. 19.) 

Dial. 81. 

Neither shall they marry, nor be given in 
marriage, but shall be equal to the angels, 
being the children of God, and of the resur- 
rection. {Luke xx. 36.) 

Dial 105. 

Father, into Thy hands I commend my 
spirit. {Luke xxiii. 46.) 



Citations which appear to be from St. 
Mark. 

Dial 1 00. 

And one of His disciples, who was formerly 
called Simon, he surnamed Peter. {Mark 
iii. 16) 

Dial 83. 

Is not this the carpenter ? {Mark vi. 3.) 

Apol. i. 45. 
His disciples going forth preached every- 
where. {Mark xvi. 20.) 



244 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



Dial. 32. 

He was taken up into heaven. {Mark xvi. 

i 9 .) 

There are hardly any passages which look 
like formal citations from St. John j 1 indeed 
the special features of that Gospel rendered 
it unsuitable for quotation in controversy 
with those outside the Church ; still Justin 
calls our Lord " the only-begotten " {Dial. 
105) and "the Word" [Apol. ii. 6, and 
about twenty other places). 

He also says {Apol. ii. 6), " by Him He 
created all things." He also refers to our 
Lord's words about the serpent in the wil- 
derness {Dial. g4.=Jo/in iii. 14); our Lord 
curing persons who had been disabled from 
their birth {Dial. 6g=Jo/m ix. 1) ; the water 
of life {Dial. 14 = John iv. 10, etc.) ; the vine 
and the branches {Dial. 110= John xv. 1) ; 
those who pierced the Christ {Dial. 64 and 
1 18= John xix. 34); the gathering together 

1 See however the remarks on Justin's use of St. 
John in Salmon's hiiroduction, p. 72, note. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 245 

of the scattered children (Apol. i. ^=John 
xi. 52). 

And one more extensive reference may be 
reserved for the end : 

" Unless ye be born again, ye shall not 
enter into the kingdom of the heavens ; but 
that it is impossible for those who have once 
been born to enter into their mothers' wombs 
is evident to all " (ApoL i. 61= John iii. 4). 

Such then are the citations which Justin 
made from the written records which he had 
before him, which he called Gospels, and 
which, he said, were written by apostles of 
the Lord and the followers of apostles, and 
were read every Sunday in the Church ser- 
vice. The question is, whether these were 
the same Gospels which we now have or 
different ones. 

We are logically bound to believe that 
they were the same Gospels, unless there be 
some insuperable objection to this view ; for 
otherwise we must postulate the existence 
and general Church use of a different set of 



246 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

Gospels, which Justin used A.D. 150, but 
which had entirely disappeared and given 
place to our Gospels A.D. 172, when Tatian 
compiled his Diatessaron. 

Now this is an extremely improbable 
hypothesis, and one which nothing but sheer 
necessity should drive us to adopt. Is there 
then this necessity ? 

Those who say, " Yes," support their view 
by pointing to the inexactness of Justin's 
citations, and say that they are so different 
from the kindred passages in our Gospels 
that we cannot believe that he used the 
latter. But this is a very inadequate reason 
for disturbing our conclusion ; for, in the 
first place, Justin is noted for inexact quota- 
tions, of which we may find many instances 
where he refers to the books of the Old Testa- 
ment, about which there can be no dispute. 
And, in the next place, Justin seems not 
to have reached a high standard of literary 
or artistic precision ; for his arguments are 
often loose, and his language often wanting 
in finish. Besides, we cannot always be sure 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 247 



that Justin means to give a verbatim report 
of the words of one particular Gospel. On 
the contrary, we can point to some instances 
in which his object is clearly to combine the 
words of the different Gospels, so as to pre- 
sent a full account of the particular matter 
of which he is writing. This is a most 
interesting point, for it shows that the 
germs of the Diatessaro7i of Tatian are to be 
traced in the works of his master and teacher 
Justin. 

Let us cite some instances of this. 

ApoL i. 33. 

Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb 
{Luke i. 31), of the Holy Ghost {Matt. i. 20), 
and shalt bear a Son, and He shall be called 
the Son of the Highest {Luke i. 31, 32), and 
thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall 
save His people from their sins [Matt. i. 21). 1 

1 Perhaps it is significant that Justin's words imme- 
diately following this composite quotation are ws ot 
a.Tro;j.vrnj.QvevaavTes iravra to, irepl tov gutt)pos ij l uQi> 'I-qcrou 
XpiaTov edida^av. Was he conscious that he was using 
the words not of one but of two records ? 



248 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY 



Dial 88. 

I am not the Christ, but the voice of one 
crying {John i. 20, 23) ; for there shall come 
one mightier than I {Luke iii. 16) whose 
shoes I am not worthy to bear {Matt. iii. 11). 

From these and similar instances 1 it would 
appear that Justin (like his pupil Tatian) did 
not hesitate to modify, by omission, addition, 
combination, or paraphrase, the words which 
he found in his Gospels. These had not yet 
been declared by the Church to have been 
divinely inspired, nor did Justin regard them 
in any other light than as authentic writings 
in which reliable history was recorded. 
There was no doctrinal reason to prevent 
him from handling them in this free way, and 
more especially when writing for unbelievers, 
and citing probably from memory. We may, 
therefore, conclude that the verbal inexact- 
ness of Justin's citations is no valid reason 
for doubting that the Gospels which he used 
were the very same which twenty-two years 

1 See additional note at the end of this chapter. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 249 

later formed the material for the Diatessaron, 
and which are the same Gospels which we 
now value. 

But the remark which was made at the 
outset about Tatian must here be accom- 
modated to Justin : that the Gospels cannot 
have been quite new when they were thus 
copiously used by him. They must have 
had an assured position in his time. They 
must have already won their way to recog- 
nition as the exclusively authentic form of 
apostolic tradition. And therefore we are 
justified in pushing them back at least twenty 
years before the first Apology of Justin, 
which was written about A.D. 150. This 
fixes A.D. 150 at the latest date at which 
they can possibly have been composed ; and 
our next step must be to push them far- 
ther back into the very lifetime of St. John 
himself. 

You will have taken note of the fact, that 
though Tatian and Justin make such copious 
use of our four Gospels, they never tell us 
the names of the persons by whom they were 



250 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

written. 1 Our next witness will, however, in 
the case of two of our four Gospels, give us 
this information. 

This witness is Papias, bishop of Hiera- 
polis, a city which was only a few miles from 
Colossae and Laodicea, and which is men- 
tioned in St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians. 

We must first say something of the date 
of Papias, as this has been very variously 
estimated by writers of opposite schools 
of thought. 

Some critics, like Alford, placed him as 
early as A.D. 1 10; while others asserted that he 
suffered martyrdom as late as A..D. 164. The 
latter depended entirely on a passage in the 
Chronicon Paschale, which was compiled in the 
first half of the seventh century, and which 
represented Papias as having suffered martyr- 
dom at Pergamum about the same time when 
Polycarp suffered at Smyrna. Bishop Light- 
foot has however conclusively proved that 
this passage of the Chronicon Pascliale, which 
is the only authority for saying that Papias 
1 See however p. 238, note 2. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 251 

suffered martyrdom, was a blundering tran- 
script of a" passage of Eusebius, in which, 
after mentioning the martyrdom of Polycarp 
at Smyrna, the learned historian went on to 
give the names of three persons who were 
martyred at Pergamum, Carpus and PAPYLUS 
and a woman, Agathonice. 

There are so many similarities between the 
two passages that it cannot be doubted that 
the one is a transcript of the other, and that 
the scribe ignorantly substituted Papias, a 
name with which he was doubtless familiar, 
for Papylus, a name of unusual occurrence. 
"If," says Lightfoot, "the last letters of the 
word were blurred or blotted in his (j.e. the 
chronicler's) copy of Eusebius, nothing would 
be more natural than such a change." 

Xow Ave have three reasons for assigning 
an early date to Papias. 

The first of these is a statement made by 
himself in a fragment which Eusebius has 
preserved for us, that he was a personal 
hearer of some of our Lord's own disciples : 
we shall discuss the passage later on. 



252 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

The second reason for assigning an early 
date to Papias is, that Eusebius says that he 
(Papias) gives in his writings an account of 
several miracles of which he had been told 
by the daughters of Philip, who lived with 
their father in Hierapolis, the town of which 
Papias was bishop ; for whether this Philip 
be correctly described as the apostle, or as 
the evangelist, there can be no doubt that 
his daughters are the same persons who are 
mentioned in Acts xxi. 9 as prophetesses 
living at that time at Csesarea. 

Our third reason for assigning an early 
date to Papias is the distinct statement of 
Irenseus (who was to a certain extent his 
admirer) that he was a hearer of John, and a 
companion of Polycarp. 

This Polycarp is supposed by some critics 
to have been none other than the Angel of 
the Church of Smyrna, whom St. John 
mentions in the second chapter of the 
Revelation. 

At any rate there is no doubt that he was 
a disciple of St. John ; and therefore, as 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 253 

Papias was a companion of his, he too must 
have lived before the end of St. John's life, 
At least this is the most probable inference. 

Influenced by these three considerations, 
Bishop Lightfoot and other safe critics assign 
A.D. 130 as the date at which Papias probably 
flourished and wrote his celebrated book. 

And now as to that book. Where is it to 
be found ? What was its character ? And 
what is its bearing on our Gospels ? 

As to the first question, Where is the book 
to be found ? You will probably be disap- 
pointed when I tell you that it is lost. 

Though we are told by Church writers who 
saw the work and had it in their hands, that 
it consisted of five books, we have now only 
a very few extracts, which were fortunately 
transcribed by later writers, and have thus 
been preserved for us. 

It is just as if the five books of Moses had 
perished, and only about twenty verses here 
and there had escaped, by being transcribed 
into the works of later writers. 

Still the providence of God has left us 



254 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

quite enough of Papias to enable us to come 
to a conclusion on the important point which 
we are discussing. We have first the title of 
the work ; next we have an extract from the 
preface ; we have then a few short extracts 
from the body of the work. 1 Let us deal 
with these in turn. 

The title of the work was 
AOTinN KTPIAKI2N EBHmSEIZ, 
" Expositions of Oracles relating to the 
Lord." 

Now this title tells us two things : it tells 

us that Papias was an expositor, and it tells 

us what it was that he expounded. The five 

books of Papias, then, were Expositions, and 

he himself is classed by later writers among 

the expositors of the early Church, as Irenaeus, 

Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Pantae- 

nus, and Ammonius. We have, therefore, 

got one step on our journey ; for we have 

1 These extracts, which are quotations of Papias 
made by Eusebius and later writers, are to be found 
in the smaller Leipzig ed. of The Apostolic Fathers. 
See also for an English translation T. & T. Clark's 
" Ante-Nicene Christian Library," vol. i. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 255 

found that Papias had some record or writing 
before him, which he set himself to explain 
and expound, probably for the benefit of his 
flock in the diocese of Hierapolis. 

What was this writing ? It is called by 
Papias himself " Oracles of the Lord " ; that 
is, Oracles relating to the Lord, or having 
the Lord for their subject. 

With regard to the word " Oracles," we are 
familiar with several passages in the New 
Testament where it refers to the Old Testa- 
ment Scriptures : but here the addition of 
the adjective Kvpianwv, that is, relating to 
the Kvpios (our Lord Jesus Christ) transfers 
the word " Oracles " from their Old Testa- 
ment sense to mean "the Scriptures which 
describe and have especially to do with the 
person of our Lord " ; in a word, the Gospels. 
Accordingly, this word "Oracles" is found 
applied to the New Testament. Photius says 
that the Scriptures recognised by Ephraem, 
patriarch of Antioch, consisted of the Old 
Testament, and the Oracles of the Lord 
{same Greek words), and the Preachings of the 



256 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

Apostles. 1 Here the expression " Oracles of 
the Lord " is evidently only another name for 
the Gospels ; and the same use of the word 
is found in Irenseus. Without entering 
farther into this question, we shall therefore 
take it as proved that the nature of the work 
of Papias was, a Commentary or Exposition 
of the written Gospels. 

And if we omit for the moment all refer- 
ence to the fragment of the Preface which 
Eusebius has preserved, and go on to the 
fragments of the work itself, we find Papias 
actually giving the names of two of the 
evangelists on whose work he is commenting. 
The first fragment is as follows : 
" And the elder said this also : Mark, 
having become the interpreter of Peter, 
wrote down accurately everything that he 
remembered, without, however, recording in 
order what was either said or done by Christ. 
For neither did he hear the Lord, nor did 
he follow him ; but afterwards, as I said, 
[attended] Peter, who adapted his instruc- 
1 See Lightfoot, pp. 172-176. 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 257 

tions to the needs [of his hearers], but had 
no design of giving a connected account 
of the Lord's Oracles. So then Mark made 
no mistake, while he thus wrote down some 
things as he remembered them ; for he made 
it his one care not to omit anything that he 
heard, or to set down any false statement 
therein." 

Now, all that need be said about this 
extract is, that Eusebius, the person in whose 
work it occurs, distinctly noted that it re- 
lated to Mark, the writer of the Gospel ; and 
this was the universal opinion of Church 
writers. 

With regard to Matthew, Eusebius wrote, 
the following statement is made (i.e. in the 
work of Papias) : " So then Matthew wrote 
the Oracles in the Hebrew language, and 
each one interpreted them as he could." 

Here it is the opinion of Bishop Lightfoot 
that the past tense interpreted refers to a 
time long gone by when Papias wrote, a 
time when the first Gospel existed only in 
its original Hebrew form, and when there 

17 



258 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



was no recognised translation. This state 
of affairs seems to have come to an end 
before Papias wrote ; and Lightfoot thinks 
that his words may be taken as implying 
that in his day there was a recognised Greek 
translation. 

At any rate, whether that be true or not, 
it cannot be denied that Papias in these ex- 
tracts referred to Mark and Matthew as the 
writers of Gospels. And we have the same 
question to face again which we have faced 
already, as to whether these were the same 
Gospels which we now have. Well, no doubt 
of this was entertained by Eusebius, or any 
other Church writer. They all accepted what 
seemed so plain and fair an inference ; and 
which would have been accepted without 
question in the case of any secular author — 
that Papias was dealing with the Gospels of 
St. Matthew and St. Mark as they were 
known all through the history of the Church, 
and as they are now known to us. 

The sceptical hypothesis, however, is that 
there was an original St. Matthew different 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 259 

from, but the parent of, our St. Matthew, and 
an original St. Mark different from, but the 
parent of, our St. Mark ; and that it is these 
originals, and not our degenerate transforma- 
tions of them, on which Papias commented. 
But there is not the smallest shred of evi- 
dence that there ever were Gospels of 
Matthew and Mark different in scope and 
contents from those which we now possess. 1 
Who does not see therefore that this modern 
quibble has been adopted in despair by those 
who dislike the miraculous character of our 
Gospels, and would postulate anything, 
however unlikely, for the purpose of dis- 
crediting them ? 

But perhaps some of you are mentally 
asking the question, " Why does not Papias 
tell us something of St. Luke and St. John ?" 
This is an improper question ; you should 
rather ask, " Why does not Eusebius tell us 
that Papias gives some account of St. Luke 

1 I say " different in scope and contents," because 
it must be admitted that St. Matthew wrote originally 
in Hebrew. 



260 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



and St. John?" For Papias may have said 
ten thousand things in his books of Expo- 
sitions which Eusebius did not think it 
necessary to quote, especially as he had a 
low opinion of his mental capabilities. Let 
me make my meaning clear by an illustra- 
tion. Perhaps there is some one here taking 
notes of my lecture, who for some reason has 
neglected to record my remark about Justin's 
practice of combining the words of the 
different Gospels, or Bishop Lightfoot's clever 
discovery of the confusion of Papias with 
Papylus. Suppose that note-book were to 
come into the hands of a critic in five years' 
time, as the only available source from which 
information about my lecture could be drawn, 
would it be fair for him to argue that I said 
nothing about these two points, on the 
ground that there was no reference to them 
in the note-book ? 

In the same way it is very unfair to urge 
that Papias knew nothing and said nothing 
about Luke and John in his five books which 
are lost, on the slender ground that Eusebius 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 261 



has not seen fit to quote any such statements 
from them. 

The general practice of Eusebius is, to 
record only strange and unlooked for tilings 
about those books of the New Testament 
of whose authority there was never any 
doubt in the Church ; and so here he re- 
cords of Mark that he was the hearer and 
chronicler of Peter's utterances, and of 
Matthew that he wrote originally in Hebrew. 

Let us regret that Eusebius has given us 
no more of Papias, but let us not commit 
ourselves to the fallacy that because some of 
Papias is found in Eusebius therefore nothing 
which is absent from Eusebius can have been 
in Papias. 

The points about Papias which we have 
now reached are, that he was an expositor of 
the Gospels, and that even the few extracts 
of his expositions which we now have refer 
by name to Matthew and Mark. 

We must now glance for a few moments 
at the source and nature of his expositions ; 
the former is plainly indicated in the extract 



262 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



from the Preface which Eusebius has pre- 
served. I shall quote it according to the 
translation of Lightfoot : 

" But I will not scruple also to give a place 
for you along with my interpretations to 
everything that I learnt carefully and re- 
membered carefully in time past from the 
elders, guaranteeing their truth. For, unlike 
the many, I did not take pleasure in those 
who have so very much to say, but in those 
who teach the truth ; nor in those who relate 
foreign commandments, but in those [who 
record] such as were given from the Lord 
to the Faith, and are derived from the Truth 
itself. And again, on any occasion when a 
person came [in my way] who had been a 
follower of the elders, I would inquire about 
the discourses of the elders — what was said 
by Andrew, or by Peter, or by Philip, or by 
Thomas or James, or by John or Matthew, 
or any other of the Lord's disciples, and what 
Aristion and the elder John, the disciples of 
the Lord, say. For I did not think that I 
could get so much profit from the contents 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 263 

of books as from the utterances of a living 
and abiding voice." 

According to this passage, you see that 
Papias lived in a place where and at a time 
when he could meet persons who, like Aris- 
tion and the elder John, had themselves seen 
and heard the Lord ; or who had been com- 
panions of Andrew, Peter, Philip, Thomas, 
James, John, and Matthew. And you are 
informed that his general practice was to 
question such persons as to incidents about 
our Lord, and precepts which He gave. 
These apostolic traditions he treasured 
carefully in his mind, and when he after- 
wards wrote his expositions of the Gospels, 
he did not scruple to incorporate these inci- 
dents and sayings, and to give them a place 
with his interpretations. 

Of the mere handful of these traditions 
collected and recorded by Papias, which have 
survived to our day, some seem foolish 
enough, and were probably picked up by the 
credulous bishop from some designing rogue, 
and not from hearers of the Lord. 



264 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 

Here are two of the foolish sort : 
i. " As the elders relate, who saw John the 
disciple of the Lord, that they had heard 
from him how the Lord used to teach con- 
cerning those times, and to say, ' The days 
will come in which vines shall grow, each 
having ten thousand shoots, and on each 
shoot ten thousand branches, and on each 
branch again ten thousand twigs, and on 
each twig ten thousand clusters, and on each 
cluster ten thousand grapes, and each grape 
when pressed shall yield five- and - twenty 
measures of wine. And when any of the 
saints shall have taken hold of one of their 
clusters, another shall cry, " I am a better 
cluster ; take me, bless the Lord through 
me." Likewise also a grain of wheat shall 
produce ten thousand heads,' etc. 

" These things Papias, who was a hearer 
of John and a companion of Polycarp, an 
ancient worthy, witnesseth in writing in the 
fourth of his books, for there are five books 
composed by him. And he added, saying, 
' But these things are credible to them that 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 265 



believe.' And when Judas the traitor did 
not believe, and asked, ' How shall such 
growths be accomplished by the Lord ? ' he 
relates that the Lord said, ' They shall see 
who shall come to these [times].' " 

2. In this same fourth book of his exposi- 
tions he relates the sufferings of Judas after 
he had betrayed our Lord. He says that 
Judas walked about in the world a terrible 
example of impiety, and then proceeds to 
give most minute and painful details of the 
torments which he endured, such as might 
be anticipated in the pages of a modern 
" penny dreadful," rather than in the com- 
mentary of an ancient and learned bishop. 

You are not, however, to suppose that all 
the illustrations of Gospel narratives quoted 
by Papias are of this character ; some are 
much more worthy of being seriously con- 
sidered. Such are the miracles related to 
him by the daughters of Philip at Hierapolis, 
the resurrection of a dead man, and the 
drinking a cup of deadly poison without 
injury by Justus who was surnamed Bar- 



266 LITERATURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



sabas, whom the holy apostles after the 
Ascension of our Lord put forward with 
Matthias as a candidate for the apostolate, 
and whom a little lower down Papias de- 
nominates by his proper name Joseph. 

But it is time for us to draw to a close. I 
have not mentioned all the early vestiges of 
the fourfold Gospel, but have only endea- 
voured to supply a graduated scale by which 
those Gospels which at the beginning of our 
inquiry we found placed at the end of the 
second century and a hundred years from 
St. John may now be brought down step by 
step to the beginning of that century, and to 
the lifetime of St. John himself. 

The first step down the ladder is from the 
days of Clement, Irenseus, and Tertullian at 
the end of the second century to Tatian, who 
composed his Diatessaron A.D. 172. The 
next step is from the Diatessaron to Justin 
Martyr, A.D. 150. The next step is from 
Justin to Papias, who commented on the 
Gospels about A.D. 130, and in whose com- 
mentary the Gospels themselves (so far as we 



VESTIGES OF THE GOSPELS. 267 



know) were mentioned in words which im- 
plied that they themselves had been written 
long before. 

There are many of our own friends and 
relatives who have a vivid recollection of the 
year in which O'Connell died and the famine 
occurred in Ireland, and who have printed in 
their memory the sayings and doings of that 
very eventful time. Xow that requires a 
stretch of recollection reaching back forty- 
four years ; and if Papias may be credited 
with anything like as good a memory, why 
may not he in or about A.D. 130 have been 
able to recollect stories which were told him, 
and characteristics of his informants, so far 
back as A.D. 86 ? Why may not Papias, in 
short, have been personally acquainted with 
men who were youths at the time when our 
Lord Himself lived, died, rose, and ascended? 

We are thus furnished with a chain of 
external testimony, which reaches back to the 
lifetime of some of the apostles themselves, 
which allows no space for the incubation of 
myth or the accretion of legend, and which, 



268 LITER A TURE OF SECOND CENTURY. 



when properly grasped, cannot fail to bind us 
more firmly than ever to the personal and 
historical Lord Jesus Christ of the catholic 
creeds. 



ADDITIONAL NOTE ON JUSTIN AND 
TAT I AN. 



Besides (i) Apol. i. 33 (mixture of Luke i. 31, 32, 
and Matt. i. 21), and (2) Dial. 88 (mixture of John i. 
20, 23 ; Lukeiii. 16 and Matt iii. 11), which are quoted 
on p. 247, the following composite citations should be 
considered : 

(3) Dial. 51 (mixture of Luke xvi. 16 and Matt. 

xi. 12). 

(4) Apol. i. 16 (mixture of Matt. iv. 10 ; Luke iv. 8 
and Mark xii. 30). 

(5) Apol. i. 19 (mixture of Matt. x. 28 and Luke 

xii. 5). 

(6) Apol. i. 15 (mixture of Luke vi. 30 and Matt, 
v. 42). 

(7) Dial. 15 (mixture of Matt, xxiii. 23 and Luke 
xi. 42). 

Minute study of these and similar instances might 
lead to the conviction that Justin pursued the same 
practice of combining the words of the different 
Gospels which his pupil Tatian afterwards reduced 
to an art. In the first instance here quoted (see p. 
247, note 1) he seems to be conscious that he is using 
a plurality of records. I cannot help thinking that 
if we had some examples of his public lectures to 
Christians, which would doubtless contain a larger 
269 



2JO 



proportion of citations from the Gospels than the three 
works which are extant, inasmuch as the latter were 
addressed to those who were not Christians, much 
light might be thrown upon the origin of the Diates- 
saron of Tatian. That work is so perfect in its way, 
that it is hard to believe that no previous efforts had 
been made in the same direction. It remains merely 
to point out four instances in which Justin and Tatian 
agree in a peculiar reading. In each of these cases 
the reading finds some support from other authorities 
also, which are given in Zahn. 

(1) Justin, Dial. 88=Zahn's Tatia?i, p. 125. 

" When Jesus went down to the water, a fire was 
kindled in the Jordan." 

(2) Justin, Ap. i. 63 ; Dial. ioo=Zahn's Tatian, 
p. 149. 

" No one knows the Father but the Son, and no one 
knows the Son but the Father." 

(3) Justin, Dial. ioi=Zahn's Tatian, p. 174. 

" None is good but one, My Father who is in the 
heavens." 

(4) Justin, Dial. i7=Zahn's Tatian, p. 198. 

" Woe to you, scribes, for you have the keys 
(plural)." 



Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. 



APft 24 



